Confession time for Canadian playwright MacIvor

Confession, Daniel MacIvor's newest play, makes its debut next week at the Mulgrave Road Theatre in Guysborough, N.S.

An actor, filmmaker and screenwriter originally from Cape Breton, MacIvor is now juggling projects in a schedule that's seen him bounce from Winnipeg to Washington to Montreal in the past month.

MacIvor created his acclaimed 1998 play Marion Bridge and his 2006 play How It Works for Mulgrave Road Theatre, where he has a 12-year connection.

Confession was a work that hit him "like a wrecking ball" he said, and he wrote it in just over three weeks while in residency at the theatre last winter.

It is a play "for anyone who's ever been a parent or ever had a parent," MacIvor said in an interview with CBC cultural affairs show Q on Thursday.

The play tells the stories of three women of different generations — outwardly different, but with underlying similarities in the way they relate to the world.

"It's about the way these three women relate to one another and part of the mystery of the play is that you clearly see a very specific kind of relationship and that relationship is revealed. So the play, as a lot of my stuff does, leads you in various directions and then finally lands near something close to the truth," MacIvor said.

The women are being played by Barbara Gordon, Sherry Smith and Gil Anderson in a production that opens next Wednesday in Guysborough and will tour through Truro, Wolfville, Antigonish and Chester.

MacIvor says Confession has a touch of the old-fashioned, and a touch of the experimental.

"I wanted to write a very old-fashioned kind of story-telling — almost a bit of throwback to the idea of sitting in the parlour listening to radio. Something that was very verbal and full of images," he said.

MacIvor, who wrote and starred in the film Whole New Thing and appeared in the Halifax film Growing Op,  has no fewer than four theatre projects now on the go.

His How It Works began a run at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg last week and his comedic romance A Beautiful View is running in Washington.

Meanwhile, MacIvor is working on a follow-up to Confession, called Redemption, at the National Theatre School in Montreal.

Confession and Redemption are two parts of a planned trilogy that includes  Communion, MacIvor said.

"All three plays are an exploration of man's search for meaning and the pandemic of narcissism and if that doesn't sound like a good time, I don't know what does," he said.

Grappled with narcissism

MacIvor said the idea came from exploring his own struggles with narcissism as a writer and actor.

"Looking at why I had made a lot of decisions that I had and … maybe looking at how I could be more of service to others than to myself," he said.

"I've become convinced that the only thing we can do that's of any worth is to be of service to other people."

MacIvor has begun workshopping Redemption with actors at the National Theatre School in Montreal.

And he has yet another large commission to come. Two weeks ago, he was named winner of a $25,000 playwriting commission from the Banff Centre for the Arts.

He will be writing an as-yet-untitled play about a conventional Japanese interpreter and her radical Canadian boyfriend.