During their first solo outing together, House, the dynamic became clear. A MacIvor/Brooks show doesn’t begin with a finished script that goes into a conventional rehearsal process, but often starts with a character, an idea, a series of fragmented moments, and then the two men begin to work together. “I make the shows with him,” explains Brooks, “but I never try to write for him. I suggest things, and then he takes them and makes them his own. On all the shows, I’ve worked through every line with him and was intimately involved with the structure, just as he was intimately involved with the direction.”
But one incident from a rehearsal in the creation of House stands out from all the rest, touching the essence of the way Brooks works with all his authors. “I was sitting in the audience one day,” he recalls, “and I knew [Daniel] had a very complicated relationship with Ken McDougall, someone he had left for his creative relationship with me. So I said, ‘Okay, there’s Ken, there’s a bunch of people in the audience; what do you have to say to them?’ And the character of angry Victor emerged immediately, with the kind of aggression that is full of pre-emptive strikes: ‘Before you hate me, I’m going to hate you.’ ”
MacIvor was also grateful for another breakthrough Brooks helped him achieve. “Daniel asked me why I wanted to do this show,” remembers MacIvor, “and I went on about how it was important to give voice to a character you might just pass on the street, etc. Then he interrupted me and said, ‘If it’s just because you want to be a star, that’s okay, too.’ I said, ‘Yes, I want to be a star.’ There was something in me that wanted to feel accepted, that I was good, that I was worthy. When Daniel gave me permission to want that, it immediately stopped being so important.”
From the flamboyant, mercurial MacIvor to mathematician John Mighton would be an impossible leap for most directors, but not Brooks. Mighton recalls that they began as friends: “Our daughters were born within a few months of each other in 1992, and we started hanging out with each other in the park. Then our daughters became best friends. I finally remember begging him in the park one day to remount Possible Worlds, and he did.”
Mighton loves working with Brooks because “he doesn’t impose a lot until the play is developed. He tries everything he can to make it work. Generally, when he asks for a change it’s pretty serious.” Says Brooks of their 2005 hit, “Half Life grew scene by scene over a period of years. That’s the way it works with John.” He recalls how at one point in the process a new scene was needed and Mighton required an extra push to get it done, so Brooks simply picked a day, hired a bunch of actors, and told his friend they’d be working on the new material that day. “John has such a sense of responsibility,” says Brooks, smiling, “that I knew he wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone.” The day came, the scene was there, and Half Life continued its successful evolution.
Totally different yet again is the collaboration between Brooks and Rick Miller, with whom he created Bigger Than Jesus and the upcoming HardSell. The two met on the set of the movie Robert Lepage was making of Mighton’s Possible Worlds. “I was playing a character,” Brooks adds wryly, “that I had cut from the stage script.” Miller remembers that “we actually met at the craft services table. I had seen his work with MacIvor and wanted to work with someone like him on Bigger Than Jesus. So I pitched him.”
Brooks recalls how Miller “told me about his troubled relationship with Catholicism, but said, ‘I know the Catholic liturgy by heart.’ And I thought, ‘I can make a play out of that: a guy who knows the Catholic liturgy by heart and it doesn’t mean a thing to him any more.’ ”
“He brings an outside perspective to your work,” explains Miller of the process they went through with Bigger Than Jesus. “He’s both a wonderful audience and a man who knows how to ask the right questions at the right time. I always wanted more theatre to it, but Daniel felt it worked simply just speaking the words. He always resented my attempt to provide theatre tricks to hide empty content.” As they continue toward the opening of HardSell, Miller feels he’s found “a mentor and a wise older brother,” and Brooks’ only caveat is that “he’s such a gentleman all the time, and sometimes I don’t want him to be.”
At fifty, with a substantial career behind him and an equally promising one before of him, the artistic director of the Necessary Angel Theatre Company admits that “sometimes I look back and consider myself fortunate that [MacIvor, Mighton, and Miller] have had an interest in working with me. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I’m a really good listener.” But as he enters his second half century, he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. It can often take three or four years for a Brooks project to reach the stage, but it seems the time is worth it.
Critics and audiences would agree that many of his shows in the past decade (Cul-de-sac, Endgame, Bigger Than Jesus, Half Life) have been among the very best of his career. His focus grows sharper, his touch more secure, and when asked why he works in the theatre, his answer has both simplicity and depth: “I love being engaged by the intelligence of a playwright and the thoroughness of a vision.”
