Let's Run Away: Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks create a dark and dizzying comic ode
02 Nov 2019

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Cesar Ghisilieri

Peter bustles on stage getting several props arranged to his own exacting standards. "I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter/And make believe it came from you," drifts out of a small pink boombox. He manages to pull himself together enough to begin to read to us from an unpublished memoir but, only the parts that are about him. He reads, "I knew he'd been living with a pedophile carny in a cheap motel," and it is the most evocative - and my new favourite - line in a recent play. Because it is in a Daniel MacIvor (New Magic Valley Fun Town, Who Killed Spalding Gray?, Cake and Dirt, The Best Brothers, A Beautiful View, Arigato Tokyo, His Greatness) play, it is also much more than a one-liner or sumptuous fragment of prose.

The title Let's Run Away occurs as a line twice in the play, in the same context but with wildly different emotional impacts. But it echoes in teasing themes of escape, the circus, childhood whims, abduction and seduction. The story, as it emerges, is dark, disturbing and full of a melancholic hearty humour. There are also a dizzying array of references with an accent on the literary. Northrop Frye and Truman Capote co-exist with Sid Vicious and Richard Bach. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse also figures prominently, not only thematically but also in a delicious heartbreaking gag that can't be revealed. And for anyone unnerved at that amount of intellectual weight: I had to google afterwards to refresh my vague lost-to-time memory of Woolf's novel, and it didn't affect my enjoyment or understanding of Let's Run Away in any way. 

Peter is an unreliable narrator and someone who, if he weren't on stage, one would probably give a wide berth. MacIvor toys with that edge, fearlessly letting us be annoyed or even repulsed, while carefully parcelling out his innate charisma to elicit empathy and complicity. MacIvor also walks the razor-thin line of inhabiting a character while also satirizing his own career, theatre itself, and criticism. MacIvor and director Daniel Brooks (The Runner, Who Killed Spalding Gray?) must have convulsed with laughter in rehearsal as they found the perfect pitch of tantrums by Peter regarding the lighting and sound effects, as well as a way to sabotage in order to enhance the one simple but stunning special effect.

As if the dexterity with words and stagecraft weren't enough, MacIvor slides in music as a metaphor and a vehicle for emotional states. MacIvor's well-deserved reputation as a virtuoso solo performer is re-framed with an ode to bass players and jibes at Eddie Van Halen, as well as a punk rock tune about killing a cat that comments on the way the original MacIvor/Brooks partnership rocked the theatre scene. While also digging at lip-syncing, voyeurism and performance art. The multitude of themes and the sense of time always pushing forward, intertwine and coalesce in unexpected and startling ways.

Let's Run Away is fundamentally about loss, fear and letting go, but the plethora of ideas spinning throughout keep it aloft and from becoming bleak. Peter is slowly revealed to be a character we might initially ignore, if not actively avoid, who has a rich and tragic back story that is epic in its scope. And in MacIvor's, Brook's, and their finally no longer unsung crew and co-conspirators' - Kimberly Purtell (Who Killed Spalding Gray?), Deanna H Choi (The Monument), Marinda De Beer, Fiona Highet - capable hands, it becomes compelling and darkly comic.