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    See Bob Run & Wild Abandon
    See Bob Run & Wild Abandon
    See Bob Run & Wild Abandon
    Ebook70 pages48 minutes

    See Bob Run & Wild Abandon

    By Daniel MacIvor

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    About this ebook

    Bob is on the road. Bob is on the run. But from what, or whom, is she running? Follow Bob as she hops from car to car telling her story to unsuspecting drivers as she tries to put her life in the rear-view mirror. Will she make it to her destination? And what will she find when she gets there? Find out in the critically adored See Bob Run."...the ironic name stands in sharp contrast to this perceptive and thoroughly engrossing one-woman show." —Toronto StarIn Wild Abandon we are introduced to Steve, a man alone in the world. Steve is acerbic, opinionated, and desperate to figure himself out. As he recounts his life story, we follow Steve out the door of his strict Catholic home, through diners and bars and parks as we hear the tales that made the man. Wild Abandon is a story about running away, and about how to find your way home again."...a one-man show without valleys. It's a wonderful piece—honest, imaginative, profound, moving and very funny." —Carole Corbeil
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateFeb 1, 2013
    ISBN9780887549991
    See Bob Run & Wild Abandon
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      See Bob Run & Wild Abandon - Daniel MacIvor

      See Bob Run

      & Wild Abandon

      Daniel MacIvor

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Also by Daniel MacIvor:

      One Voice (House and Here Lies Henry)

      Never Swim Alone & This Is a Play

      The Soldier Dreams

      The Best Brothers

      I Still Love You

      Marion Bridge

      His Greatness

      You Are Here

      How It Works

      Cul-de-sac

      Monster

      In On It

      Bingo!

      Contents

      Title Page

      also by Daniel MacIvor

      Introduction: The Heart of the Actor

      See Bob Run

      Wild Abandon

      About the Author

      Copyright

      The Heart of the Actor

      When I wrote first wrote See Bob Run I never considered that I would, twenty-five years later while performing in a play of mine at the Stratford Festival, be writing a new foreword to the play’s re-publication. I don’t know that I really considered much of anything about the future at that time. I wasn’t considering my career or my body of work or anything else, I was concerned about telling a story—and writing a play that would convince my best friend to move to Toronto from Halifax to perform it—that was it. See Bob Run was written quickly, without workshops, without extensive dramaturgy, without asking too many questions about why. Of course, perhaps this has to do with the foolish genius of youth. These days I could not write a play in that way—I couldn’t imagine working without a dramaturge, without a clear sense of my audience, and I would be too bogged down with the why questions and concerns about how the play would reflect my body of work, my career.

      Wild Abandon came a year later, and even here one can see that I was starting to think about things beyond storytelling. I was already asking questions about the why of storytelling, and because of that Wild Abandon is a more difficult play to access than See Bob Run. And while the See Bob Run you hold is the original, there are actually two versions of Wild Abandon—a shorter version that was performed in a solo-performance festival in Toronto and this version, extended into a longer play. The first version is long lost, written ages before the days of hard drives and the eternal life of the Digital Universe. So clearly with this Wild Abandon I had begun a relationship with dramaturgy, and with the success of See Bob Run I had started to catch the whiff of a career and all the odd concerns such thoughts bring. But even still, beyond my simple thoughts about non-linear and open-to-interpretation narrative, Wild Abandon came from a clear and direct desire to put myself on stage in my own work and to expose the heart of the actor.

      Of all the plays I have written, See Bob Run and Wild Abandon have probably had the most impact—the plays found their way into high schools and are done often there, and based on conversations I have had with artistic directors across the country, monologues from both these plays are by far the most seen in general auditions—some ADs can actually recite parts of Steve’s diner speech from Wild Abandon based on how many times they have seen young actors perform it. And when I ask myself why, I am drawn to consider who Bob and Steve are, who they represent. Both are outsiders; from the outset neither seem to fit the mould of who everyone else appears to be—both misunderstood, both feeling unloved, both so lonely. This loneliness seems to me the key to why any of us do the things we do. Most of us spend our lives doing anything—marrying for the sake of marrying, immersing ourselves in our careers, numbing ourselves with television and alcohol, losing ourselves in dreams of what might be—rather than just sitting in the is of our lives. Because in that is exists a kind of loneliness. But what I understand now at the age of fifty, and what neither Bob nor Steve can quite come to grips with—certainly not at the beginning of their stories—is that that’s okay. The Buddhists say that the perfect way to view life is through tears, tears brought on by the beauty of all things and the knowledge that

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