Berto_Tony_201307_PhD .pdf - University of Guelph

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emulate Williams. The only physical description of Playwright given in the text is that of
"an older man", with no mention of any further staging details that might suggest
Williams's physicality or persona (MacIvor 1). MacIvor also made it clear to Ed Roy, the
director of the Toronto production, that the play is “not a bio-play about Williams” (Roy).
MacIvor's text thus lets a reader understand that his play borrows from Williams's
life, but only uses it as the loose basis on which to write a gay story. The author makes no
claim that anything in the text is meant to have a factual basis. This is made apparent by
some obvious differences between the drama and Williams's life. Neither Williams's own
autobiography nor Hayman's celebrated biography of Williams mentions him having a
long-term companion or assistant after Frank Merlo died in the early sixties. Yet
Playwright's long-term relationship with Assistant forms the central inquiry of the play. In
this regard, and in other details, the play deviates from what is known of Williams's life.
Furthermore, the play appears to be Assistant's story more than it is Playwright's, even
though the former character appears to be purely one of MacIvor's invention. (Roy sees the
play as Assistant’s story. This fact is underscored in the rewritten version of the script –
where the play’s bookends do not feature Playwright in the process of creation, but rather
two monologues by Assistant, recalling the characters’ fates.) By creating the long-term
relationship between Assistant and Playwright, MacIvor distances his work from the
biographical record, and creates a work that is only loosely based on Williams’s life rather
than a detailed accurate rendering.
However, the play's setting does relate to Williams's visit to Vancouver, where the
play was performed. This fact likely would have resonances with an audience and could
lead to an assumption of the play being more biographically based than MacIvor's foreword