Ghosting His Greatness

Daniel MacIvor as The Assistant.
Photo by Seán Baker

In the fall of 2011, the city of Toronto saw the premiere of Daniel MacIvor's His Greatness at the Factory Theatre. The play's producers at iArt describe the work as a "potentially true story" about American playwright Tennessee Williams's visit to the Vancouver Playhouse in 1980 for the opening of his play The Red Devil Battery Sign (His Greatness poster). Despite the heavy sense of nostalgia that resonates in the play's naturalistic style and celebration of "great men," MacIvor's script specifically addresses a timely issue in Toronto and across the country: the precarious position of the arts in our increasingly conservative, neoliberal, political economy. In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson describes the process through which theatrical performances are haunted by memories of productions past and the inevitable influence these memories have on audience reception. The Toronto production of His Greatness is an example of how the ghosting of material conditions may influence a reading of the play. With this in mind, we ask in what ways the ghosting of the production—through a haunted theatre, haunted marketing, and haunted bodies on stage—generated productive tensions between the historicity of the material conditions of this production and the text's apparent timeliness. While in many ways the play's politics seem to align with the current political situation in Toronto, the materiality of the production breaks through the narrative veil of the text—to continue with the spectral imagery—to speak of the past as it hails the future. Analyzing a theatrical production through the material conditions surrounding the performance is a critical technique theorized at length by Ric Knowles in Reading the Material Theatre. Knowles argues that "meaning is ultimately produced in the theatre through the audiences' lived experience of the entire theatrical event, and the social, cultural, and political impact of the theatrical event lives in the ways in which that experience is knitted into the social fabric of the day" (101). This materialist analysis is closely related to Carlson's concept of the ghosting of productions through an audience's familiarity with the material conditions of the performance: "The memory of that recycled material as it moves through new and different productions contributes in no small measure to the richness and density of the operations of the theatre in general as a site of memory, both personal and cultural" (3-4). Thus, in our materialist analysis of His Greatness, we pay particular attention to the ways in which our familiarity with the conditions of production influence and contextualize—either overtly or covertly—our reading and reception of the performance.

His Greatness is set in a luxurious Vancouver hotel room where the spectators witness forty-eight tense, anxious, and emotionally draining drug- and alcohol-infused hours during which the relationship between a famous playwright and his assistant unravels—an unraveling that is accelerated by the inclusion of a young male escort into an already fraught situation. The relationship between The Playwright, played by Richard Donat, and The Assistant, played by Daniel MacIvor, is both professional and highly personal. During the course of the play, which is performed in a realist style, The Assistant attends to every personal and professional need—and many whims—of The Playwright, a self-indulgent character who drowns the reality of being past his prime in his addictions. From the outset of the production, the complex nature of their relationship is at the forefront. Though it is clear who is the employer and who is the employee, who the boss is in this relationship is less apparent. In addition, while the current status of their once-romantic relationship is complicated by their continuing antagonism towards each other, the codependency of their relationship is made clear by The Playwright's childish inability to care for himself and The Assistant's explicit need to be needed. Their complicated love/hate relationship is exacerbated by the introduction of The Young Man...