Defying Tragedy: Hope in His Greatness

Daniel MacIvor's new play, His Greatness,¹ is at once a departure and a continuation of his previous work. Unlike what has come before, it is a mediation and homage to both the plays and life of a historical figure—one of the twentieth century's most celebrated American playwrights, Tennessee Williams. It also veers from MacIvor's signature theatricality, sharing more in form and style with Williams' oeuvre than his own. And yet the play continues MacIvor's interest in exploring the subtle but nevertheless profound connections that constitute human relationships inside and outside the theatre. In keeping with both Williams' work and his own, the characters in His Greatness are isolated beings that struggle with illusions and the "primary and related energies of love and death" (Williams 119); however, unlike Williams' plays, the human condition is not tragic because these characters' acts belie hope in redemption. In true MacIvor fashion, this idea is intertwined with a philosophy of the theatre that is present throughout his body of work: that the theatre's felicity is found in how it fosters and enacts empathetic connection between people through performance.

The majority of MacIvor's plays establish their most tangible relationship to "reality" through their acknowledgement of their own theatricality in performance. This is not the case with His Greatness, a play marked by differing invocations of "reality" and "realism." As MacIvor tells us in the play's Foreword, it is partially inspired by the real-life account of a friend who met Tennessee Williams when the playwright was in Vancouver for the premiere of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign, which was staged at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1980.² Following Williams in form and style, the play is prototypical realism: it has a two-act structure, takes place in one room in a twenty-four hour period, and, with the exception of its Prologue and the concluding monologue (important framing devices that I will return to), it does not break the fourth wall. His Greatness appeals to Williams not only in form and style, but also in figure. Although the Playwright, the central character in this three-hander, is never called "Williams," he is described as an older gay man and famous American playwright who, like Williams in the story MacIvor was told, is in Vancouver for the premiere of his latest play.

The play's primary concern is the relationship between the Playwright and his Assistant, "The once and former muse" who has with age become "The nursemaid" (MacIvor 7). Following the Prologue, the action of the play begins with the Assistant entering the Playwright's hotel room to wake him. Groggily, the Playwright asks questions such as, "Where are we?" and "Is it still 1980?" and poetically complains of the "the [horrible] pain in my soul." To this the Assistant replies, "That's not your soul that's your hangover" (MacIvor 5). As the scene progresses it paints a portrait of their relationship, which is characterized by familiarity, domesticity, and love—but a love that harbours pain, disappointment, and nihilism rather than joy, pleasure, or hope.

This unhappy-but-safe life is interrupted by the introduction of a third character—the Young Man—a hustler who has been hired for the evening to escort the Playwright to his premiere. After the performance and opening night party, the three men return to the hotel room with great "drunken bonhomie" (MacIvor 39). The Assistant makes a failed pass at the Young Man, who has come to prefer the Playwright for his charm, his fame, and the glamour and respect he seems to command (in short, his greatness). The Assistant's ego is bruised by the rejection; and after several passive-aggressive attacks on the Playwright, he returns to his own room. The act ends as the Playwright and the Young Man embark upon a night of fantasy, in which the Young Man reads from the Playwright's plays, taking the roles of actor and star in a cocaine-fueled drama. Act two begins the next morning, when the bad reviews are literally in, and the Assistant learns about the drugs and the false promises of stardom that the Playwright has heaped upon the desperate and naive Young Man. These revelations, acted out in a scenario that seemingly has been rehearsed before, cause the Assistant to finally face the dismal sadness of his life. Although there is love between these two, it becomes apparent to the Assistant that this love has transformed into something desperate. After finally confronting and understanding this truth, the Assistant leaves. He is followed shortly, though separately thereafter by the Young Man, leaving the Playwright alone on stage.

A meditation on greatness, the play suggests that greatness is not so great. To feel that one does not have to pursue new varieties or cultivate new hopes on account of achieving perceived greatness is to be the Playwright. Destroying yourself to be in the presence of greatness and to find meaning in supporting a "great man" is the position of the Assistant. To live in the fantasy of greatness, but do nothing to move toward that goal, is the life of the Young Man. In actuality, greatness is a kind of illusion; it has, in the words of the Playwright, "no currency—it only exists in the distance between where we think we are and what we think greatness is. It only really exists in its inaccessibility" (MacIvor 78). Their false, destructive conception and relationship to greatness results in these characters losing themselves, and becoming people who stagnantly live in dreams, rather than in the pursuit of them. The three men have become, as Raymond Williams suggests of Tennessee Williams' characters, "sleepwalkers" (119).

The play positions the concept of greatness in contrast with the dream; another illusion that must be pursued, rather than possessed. Greatness, the play suggests, is for fools who cannot face the realities of their world (and one cannot help but think of the cross-gartered Malvolio in Twelfth Night who is also blinded by "greatness"). To dream, on the other hand, is to carefully survey your circumstances and consciously manoeuvre with the hope of achieving something better. This is what the Assistant realizes and what causes him to leave. In his words:

Long time since I really looked at myself in a mirror. (into the mirror) What does it say in that play…? Something about broken dreams…. 'A broken dream is worse than a forgotten dream.' Maybe I'm lucky.

(MacIvor 73)

Lucky indeed. If "[greatness] only exists in the distance between where we think we are and what we think greatness is," then in leaving the Assistant begins to re-evaluate these questions and his position in relation to them. By leaving, the Assistant embraces the possibility that he might begin again, and that he can leave a broken dream behind in search of something more.

One might interpret His Greatness in the manner that Raymond Williams interprets the oeuvre of the great American playwright:

[Tennessee Williams'] characters are isolated beings who desire and eat and fight alone […]. At their most satisfying they are animals; the rest is a covering of humanity, and is destructive. It is in their consciousness, their ideals, their dreams, their illusions that they lose themselves and become pathetic sleepwalkers. The human condition [in his plays] is tragic because of the entry of mind on the fierce, and in itself tragic, animal struggles of sex and death.

(119)

I do not see the human condition in His Greatness as tragic because its characters, particularly the Assistant, exhibit a hope for redemption. And in keeping with MacIvor's other plays, this possibility is expressed by casting the theatre as both site and means for communication and empathy, which is achieved by the metatheatrical framing of the play's Prologue and concluding monologue.³

In the Prologue, the Playwright directly addresses the audience by saying, "There you are, still and silent. Waiting. Believing that I will have something to say. All I have to offer now is my life, or what's left of it" (MacIvor 3). He tells his audience that in the past, ideas for the theatre would flood his mind, and always in the same fashion:

First came the empty stage. And what would come next was light, qualities of light […] Then […] visible objects of a world. […] But that was the beginning and now here we are in a place that must be near the end, because […] the voices are silent. The stage is dark.

(MacIvor 3)

In the concluding monologue, the Playwright addresses the audience once again. This time, however, he describes the hotel room he is in as a set for the performance that the audience has just witnessed. He finishes this description and the performance with what is, in fact, the opening of the play: "The stage is dark. It begins" (MacIvor 80). The intervening action has been the Playwright's life, which, while it may be all he has to offer, is still an act of truthful communication between artist and audience. Saying "It begins" at the end of the play suggests that the Playwright, like the Assistant and the Young Man, is starting over again by writing this play and offering it to an audience.

By framing the play between these two moments of direct address, His Greatness brings the audience's attention back to the theatrical performance in which they have taken part. In doing so, the play positions theatrical performance as a means of collective possibility through the ways it enacts dialogical communication and, hopefully, empathy. The play offers no guarantees of happiness, but it does suggest possibility, and a small amount of faith. Faith that if we have listened to and empathized with one another in the theatre, than the human condition is not tragic because we are not truly alone. It is in our connection to one another, MacIvor suggests, that hope for redemption exists.

For MacIvor, His Greatness is both a departure and a continuation that is about departure and continuation—though it is optimistically so. It hopes and believes, to quote the title to the Preface of a recent anthology of his plays, that "The End is the Beginning."