Let's Run Away

By Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks

• This is Daniel’s seventh solo show developed with collaborator Daniel Brooks
• First produced by reWork Productions at Canadian Stage, Toronto, in December 2019

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9780369103437

Daniel MacIvor

Born in Sydney, Cape Breton in 1962, Daniel MacIvor studied theatre at Dalhousie University in Halifax and George Brown College in Toronto. A prolific playwright, dynamic performer, producer, and artistic director, MacIvor has been creating original Canadian theatre since 1986 when he founded the highly acclaimed theatre company da da kamera, which has won a Chalmers Award for Innovation in Theatre (1998). MacIvor is also a successful filmmaker. His projects include the award winning short film The Fairy Who Didn’t Want to Be a Fairy Anymore. His first feature film, Past Perfect (produced by Camelia Frieberg), premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in theatres across Canada in March and April of 2003. He also adapted his Governor General’s Award-nominated stage play, Marion Bridge, for the screen (directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld), for which he won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2002 Atlantic Film Festival. Talonbooks published his play Cul-de-sac in 2005.

Book preview

Also By Daniel MacIvor

Try: Communion, Was Spring, Small Things

One Voice: House and Here Lies Henry

Never Swim Alone & This Is a Play

See Bob Run & Wild Abandon

New Magic Valley Fun Town

This Is What Happens Next

I Still Love You: Five Plays

Who Killed Spalding Gray?

The Soldier Dreams

The Best Brothers

Marion Bridge

Arigato, Tokyo

His Greatness

How It Works

You Are Here

Cul-de-sac

I, Animal

Monster

In On It

Bingo!

Let’s Run Away

Four Stories and a Message for the World Written in Response to an Unpublished Memoir

Daniel MacIvor

Playwrights Canada Press

Toronto

Let’s Run Away © Copyright 2022 by Daniel MacIvor

First edition: April 2022

Author photo © Guntar Kravis

Playwrights Canada Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Let’s run away : four stories and a message for the world written in

response to an unpublished memoir / Daniel MacIvor.

Names: MacIvor, Daniel, 1962- author.

Description: A play.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022014673X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220146756 | ISBN 9780369103413 (softcover) | ISBN 9780369103420 (PDF) | ISBN 9780369103437 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8575.I86 L48 2022 | DDC C812/.54—dc23

Playwrights Canada Press operates on land which is the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe Nations (Ojibwe / Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi, Algonquin, Saulteaux, Nipissing, and Mississauga), the Wendat, and the members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora), as well as Metis and Inuit peoples. It always was and always will be Indigenous land.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.Logo: Government of Canada.Logo: Ontario Creates.Logo: Ontario Arts Council.

For Fiona

Foreword

by Daniel Brooks

Daniel and I were in Guysborough for two weeks, the early stages of working on a play called Seven Days. I was feeling sick, and Daniel was feeling anxious. We had chopped away at this show, done a workshop in Banff where Daniel picked up a microphone and spoke for five days—long meandering stories, confessions, speculations. I would write it down as he spoke, amending and editing, speak it all back to him, and he would write it down. He told a very long tale about a guy and a Datsun and the murder of someone close, a lover perhaps, the body wrapped in a carpet and taken out to a field—endless surprising details evoking a life lived. And all this done with mountains in the background, visible through the big windows in the studio at the Banff Centre where we worked. And we were being paid and housed and fed. We are very lucky to be able to do this work.

Months after Banff and there we were in Nova Scotia, trying through some alchemical magic to turn the material we had collected in Banff, and some we had created in Toronto, into a show.

On the stage in Guysborough, an agitated Daniel picked up a little notebook, wrote something, and summoned the ailing me to the raised stage. He