Cul-de-sac

Co-founder of Toronto’s groundbreaking theatre company da da kamera, Daniel MacIvor is Canada’s most influential post-modern playwright.

In his latest collaboration with director Daniel Brooks, MacIvor plays the role of Leonard, who narrates the events leading up to his murder while trying to understand them himself. Through the course of the play, we peer behind the curtains of his neighbourhood as MacIvor transforms into the multiple characters who bear witness to Leonard’s life and death. Yet each of their stories, while internally consistent, tells a subtly different version of what happened, progressively colouring and transforming our understanding of the characters as we think we had come to know them. In a headlong rush we understand that everyone’s story inevitably dead-ends at precisely the bottom of the preconceptions they brought to its telling.

Punctuated by brilliant lighting and a mood-setting soundscape, this dazzling one-man show is storytelling of the highest order.

AUTHOR

Daniel MacIvor

Daniel Brooks is one of Canada’s most accomplished theatre makers. As a writer, director, and performer, he has collaborated with some of the country’s finest talents in producing a body of daring and original work. He has created shows with Don McKellar, Tracy Wright, Daniel MacIvor, Guillermo Verdecchia, John Mighton, and Michael Ondaatje, among others. His many achievements include a series of monologues created with Daniel MacIvor, direction of work by John Mighton, Beckett, Chekhov, Ibsen, Sophocles, Borges, and Goethe, and the musical The Drowsy Chaperone.His published work includes Insomnia, The Noam Chomsky Lectures, The Eco Show, The Good Life, Bigger Than Jesus, and The Full Light of Day. He was co-artistic director of the Augusta Company, artistic director of Necessary Angel from 2003 to 2012. He was also a playwright-in-residence at the Tarragon Theatre for seven years and the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto. His many theatre awards include the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre. Daniel’s work has toured across Canada and around the world.