Mac is back

The Best Brothers is the latest from Nova Scotia playwright and Winnipeg favourite Daniel MacIvor

Paul Essiembre (left) and Carson Nattrass in rehearsal for Daniel MacIvor’s The Best Brothers at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

Supplied

Sibling rivalry dominates in The Best Brothers, the latest work by Nova Scotia playwright Daniel MacIvor, opening October 17 at Prairie Theatre Exchange.

MacIvor’s plays are always popular with ‘Peg audiences, PTE previously produced the playwright’s pieces Marion BridgeHow It Works and most recently Bingo!, which ran in fall, 2011.

PTE artistic director Robert Metcalfe says he keeps programming MacIvor’s plays because the 51-year-old writer always manages to create characters that audiences are really able to relate with, one of the main things Metcalfe looks for in a play.

“What I want is honesty and he does a really good job of reflecting that,” Metcalfe says. “One of the things this play deals with is loss and that’s something everyone will have to cope with at some point in their lives.”

MacIvor won the Governor General’s Award for Drama in 2006 for I Still Love You, a collection of five of his plays. He also received the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre in 2008, which recognizes achievement in Canadian theatre

“He’s just a really good writer, it’s not like we’re championing a playwright no one else in Canada has heard of,” Metcalfe says. “Sometimes when you read his plays it seems like there’s very little there, but when you put his words in the hands of actors and bring it to life onstage, you realize just how rich the text really is.”

The Best Brothers is a comedy that features Paul Essiembre as Hamilton Best and Carson Nattrass as Kyle Best, two very different brothers who plan a funeral for their mother and take care of her greyhound after she dies when a drag queen named Pina Colada falls on her during a gay pride parade. 

“Sometimes it’s easy to be a part of a comedy and not laugh, you just do your job and you hope the jokes put on the page will be funny. But with this one we’re laughing a lot during rehearsal and that makes it tough to move on,” Nattrass says. 

“Kyle isn’t always able to read the temperature in the room, he can be pretty oblivious throughout the play and it’s tough to keep a straight face and just throw the most ridiculous lines out there.”

The play only features the two actors, which is a first for Nattrass who’s used to performing with a larger cast and memorizing fewer lines.

“This is basically 90 minutes of me and another guy talking, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious,” he says. “To me it’s as exciting as the bigger musicals I’ve done in the past. It’s very funny and it moves very quickly.”

While Hamilton is an architect and Kyle is a real estate agent, Nattrass says the real difference between the two characters is just their conflicting personalities. 

“My character bounces around a lot, but he’s doing just fine and ultimately I think he’s a bit happier. It’s fun to play the guy that isn’t constantly stressed or upset all the time,” he says.

Published in Volume 68, Number 7 of The Uniter (October 16, 2013)

Related Reads