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Selected Quotes:
"No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O'Donnell's talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflections into compelling analyses ... The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating."
- Kamal Al-Solaylee, The Globe and Mail
"O'Donnell writes like a sugar-addled genius at 300 km/h, making fun of his artistic and political past and humbly offering solutions based on what he's learned. Vaulting between extreme pessimism and excitedly dreaming up the sanguine possibilities of simple human interaction, the book ultimately displays a hopefulness antithetical to its occasional dive into the suicidal." [Full review]
- Zoe Whittall, The Globe and Mail
"No one can wring involving theatre from political and moral observations as acidly and entertainingly as writer/director Darren O'Donnell... keenly rational and finely framed, [O'Donnell's writing] engages the mind and the funny bone."
- Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine
"Toronto's messiah of experimental theatre. A catalyst for imaginative absurdity, the playwright blows out the walls of conventional theatre sending storyline conformists scurrying for cover."
- Steven Berketo, torontostage.com
"O'Donnell's at the forefront of the city's avant garde movement. Translation: he experiments. His plays... are a wild mixture of philosophy, rant, cant, and vaudeville... they make you sit up and think laugh, and then think some more."
- Glenn Sumi, NOW Magazine
Mammalian in the Press :
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Diplomatic Immunities
Diplomatic Immunities takes a needle to Calgary with painful and pleasurable results
by Jeff Kubick
Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex has called its work "social acupuncture," and the metaphor seems apt. The company's latest project, Diplomatic Immunities, presented on the BD&P Stage 2 (a.k.a. the Engineered Air Theatre) of Alberta Theatre Projects' playRites Festival, is a series of pinprick-quick portraits that, while briefly painful at points, produce an altogether welcome sensation.
Though I'm certain professional new media artists and theatrical professionals would balk at having their work compared to a talk show, I can think of no more appropriate summary for Diplomatic Immunities. Despite the consummate sheen of theatricality that binds its micro interviews together, it is the quintessential talk-show element of bite-sized human inquiry that provides the production's momentum. Projected onto the Engineered Air's back wall, brief interviews and images explore Calgary's denizens, with the ensemble narrating, discussing and inviting audience feedback.
- ffwdweekly.com
My year of talking to strangers
A dramaturge steps outside the theatre box for playRites experiment
by Vicki Stroich
In October I found myself standing in an apartment in an urban senior citizens' home in Toronto with a man I had met 15 minutes before. He was talking about killing people in Angola. Last February on Stephen Avenue I waited for a police officer to tell me what he imagined being a father would be like (his wife was due to have their first baby in a few months). He couldn't come up with an answer.
This year I've had people I barely know tell me about sexual abuse in their families and others tell me why they think Kanye West sounds like a woman. I've stood up in front of an audience and retold these stories, warped through the lens of my own personal bias. I've also stood up in front of an audience and had my own stories and opinions (both incendiary and innocuous) repeated, twisted and exposed.
- www.ffwdweekly.com
"It was like an intelligence debriefing with humour. The concept has unlimited possibilities." "The idea was so original. What a fascinating project." "It's hard to describe why [I was entertained] because it was simultaneously new for the stage yet very familiar."
- from audience feedback forms at ATP
A Suicide-Site Guide to the City
"Maybe it's the whole reality show vibe or the fervour around documentaries, but I find it more fascinating to watch strangers talk about laundry soap than to see someone recite lines. It's more compelling than going to a show where there's a typical emotional arc."
- NOW interview with Glen Sumi, pre-press for A Suicide-Site Guide to the City
"Darren is a strange fruit, his show is a (Molotov) cocktail - 1 part anarchy, 2 parts love, 1 part suicidal tendencies and a dash of talking street cars. It's a beautiful performance both controversial and clever. Home video and soundscapes weave us into his kaleidoscopic world where he searches desperately for the link between himself today and his past self and for any beauty in an increasingly inhibited and suffocating world, ultimately looking for a reason to stay alive. He is searching for a heart of gold, I just hope he finds one to match his own."
- Three Weeks in Edinburgh
Your Secrets Sleep With Me
"Darren O'Donnell is artistic director of Toronto-based theater group Mammalian Diving Reflex, and author of multiple plays, including A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, pppeeeaaaccceee, and White Mice. New York Press spoke with him about his first novel, Your Secrets Sleep with Me (Coach House), which is reviewed in this issue."
- Interview with Darren O'Donnell by Kate Crane for the New York Press
pppeeeaaacccee
"Darren O'Donnell is a Toronto playwright who is as thoughtful and provocative in conversation as the theatre he produces. Here, TheatreBooks gets some insight into one of his latest works, pppeeeaaaccceee, a spiritual and political rumination in O'Donnell's signature style, as well as what he thinks about theatre, politics and life."
- TheatreBooks Interview about pppeeeaaaccceee
"Intellectual and occasionally emotional, the production effectively incorporates ritualistic movement and verbal repetition. ... In Picherack's atmospheric lighting, the actors make up a committed, well-drilled unit who nonetheless relate to each other in a spontaneous, poignant fashion. Thoughtful and theatrical."
- www.nowtoronto.com
White Mice
"Brilliant conception...a highly amusing show and a provocative piece of theatre that insists on disturbing its audiences complacency."
- The Globe and Mail
"... a play that makes equal grabs for mind and heart; it provokes and entertains and does both with cheeky intelligence.... You may well argue with some of O'Donnell's conclusions, but you'll be hard pressed to find faults in this meticulously designed and directed remount.... at once sympathetic, disturbing, and supremely funny."
- eye magazine
"A touch of the Three Stooges mixed with a pinch of Ren and Stimpy, just enough to bind the kind of bleak absurdist gruel that Beckett used in Endgame and Waiting for Godot."
- The Toronto Sun
"It's kind of an in-your-face look at yourself who we are; here's the mirror," he continues, adding that "I don't think that only white people would like it and understand it I think that it has to be done. It certainly is a white perspective on it, but it's more about the human condition, and it's ugly and it's factual and it works on a lot of different levels."
- Wordmag.com, pre-press for White Mice
"I'm trying to illustrate the sort of confusion and effort that one needs to go through to come to an understanding of race that's a little more sophisticated than one that we have right now," he says. "It was pretty much Ku Klux Klan are bad, Canada is good. White Mice is a bit more subtle than that It's trying to illustrate that coming to that realization is a difficult process."
- U of Calgary Gauntlet, pre-press for White Mice
[boxhead]
"The difference in my life since then is I'm trying to have a little bit more compassion for people and where they're at," he says. "I'm trying to approach the problem [of political apathy] from a different angle." For that reason, perhaps, the new [boxhead] seeks to enlist rather than berate. "There was one point before where the audience was referred to as asleep and stupid, and the narrators were in the morally correct position," he says. "We've cleaned all that up, mostly to eradicate inconsistencies. Now the narrators refer to the audience as people who want to think for themselves."
- eye interview with Gord McGlaughlin, pre-press for [boxhead]