Two Plays: Never Swim Alone and This Is a Play

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and director of La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Daniel MacIvor is the recipient of seven Dora Mavor Moore Awards, and
has a fistful of nominations for the Chalmers Canadian Play Award.
Perhaps his best-known and most often produced play is See Bob Run. If
the two plays published in this Playwrights Canada Press script are any
indicators, his writing has more than fulfilled its early promise.

Never Swim Alone takes a circuitous and contextual route toward a
tragic ending that has the same power and inevitability about it as that
in Lanford Wilson’s Serenading Louie. The play involves two men and a
woman. As in Trafford Tanzi, the two men engage in a series of
competitive rounds of one-upmanship for which the woman acts as referee.
Through these competitions we discover that the men are close friends
and, in fact, almost clones of one another. As the play progresses,
however, we find that both differences and rivalries exist between them.
By the end we are prepared for a move back to their past as adolescents
on the final day of summer before classes begin; they are on a beach,
and there is a contest with a girl to swim out to a point. What occurs
in the last round—“Rumours of Glory”—involves a death, a lie,
and one loaded gun. Very powerful stuff.

This Is a Play is a play about a play about a play. It involves an
actor, two actresses, and the voice of a composer. Whereas Never Swim
Alone is a blow-by-blow psychological analysis of a relationship, This
Is a Play takes the actors moment by moment through a performance and
reveals thought, intention, distraction, and gaffe, mixed with the
scripted words, original music from the composer, and pauses (intended
and unintended). Utter hilarity.

The spareness of these two brilliant scripts is reminiscent of Beckett.
They will doubtless become staples of the one-act genre for both theatre
companies and acting schools. Expect to see them in fringe productions
soon.