By Joseph Hurley
SEE BOB RUN, by Daniel MacIvor. Directed by Timothy P. Jones. Starring Susan O’Connor. At Rattlestick Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl., NYC. Through June 3.
In 1999, "Never Swim Alone," by Scots-Irish playwright Daniel MacIvor, now one of Canada’s most admired writers and performers, won first prize in that year’s New York International Fringe Festival, then transferred for a respectable off-Broadway run.
At the center of the play’s three-actor cast was a young Irish-American actress, Susan O’Connor, giving an indelible performance as a whistle-bearing referee presiding over a 13-round bout in which a pair of superficially affable but deeply lethal Wall Streeters faced off in bizarre combat.
Now O’Connor is back, again off-Broadway in another MacIvor work, "See Bob Run," with the same director, the gifted Briton Timothy P. Jones. She is alone on stage this time, holding forth for a little over an hour, delivering the sly, Toronto-based dramatist’s complicated, mesmerizing prose with a grace and clarity that can only be defined as brilliant.
O’Connor is the titular Bob, short for Roberta, a misfit from the vast Canadian heartland who is on the run, hitchhiking East to the sea.
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What she is seeking, and what she is fleeing, become clear in the course of "conversations" she has with drivers who stop for her, including a lesbian whose wandering hands make Bob flee the vehicle, and a priest to whom she makes a peculiar and probably unwise "confession."
In between rides, Bob stands by the side of the road as headlights flash heedlessly past. At other moments, she stands on the rim of the stage and tells her audience details of her story, plus a fairy tale or two, including an odd little fable about a good king and a bad queen who may or may not be expecting a "royal" event.
Bob’s little yarn about a dysfunctional royal family is, it soon becomes clear, MacIvor’s way of informing us that "See Bob Run" is really, on one level at least, about child abuse, and that the confused, disturbed teenager has been badly mistreatment. In fact, the man she hopes to find is her father, expelled from the family circle sometime back by her mother, and is probably behind at least some of the rough handling she’s received in the course of growing up.
MacIvor’s plays, and his own solo stage performances, including last season’s "Monster," which he brought to P.S. 122 for a brief run, have an edgy, dangerous feel, a sense of impending risk lurking just offstage.
As usual, MacIvor’s tools are as simple as his dramaturgy is complicated. Here just a folding chair, which actress O’Connor puts in place when an "automobile" is needed, and hauls off when it isn’t, some helpful lighting effects and a fairly steady diet of music. That’s about it, but it’s enough.
Music, as it happens, plays a part in the text. Bob, like most girls of her era, is deeply involved with rock music in general, and with one musician, Timothy Prince, leader of a group called Finger Prince, or perhaps Finger Prints, whose life she will eventually alter in an irreversible manner.
Meanwhile, she wears an ABBA T-shirt. Her hair is braided on the right side, and her fingernails are painted an iridescent green. A tattoo of inky barbed wire circles her right forearm.
In the fragile, almost childlike person of O’Connor, a compulsively watchable actress, Bob, aka Roberta, despite her skittishness and her relentless self-involvement, becomes an unforgettable character.