Divinity Bash / Nine Lives: Essays on Poe

Bryden MacDonald’s most extreme venture into the world of the theatre to date, Divinity Bash, creates a play informed by Ionesco’s arid visions, Dali’s baroque excesses and Jim Morrison’s amateur nihilisms. As the main character, Albert’s secure and straight world begins to unravel, so does the structure of the language, leaving words and images to fly away from and into each other like Escher’s black birds. It is a play which proposes that of all the possible fantasies one could have indulged in, the neo-con vision of the ’90s emerged victorious because it had the invincible virtue of being the simplest (and the most stupid). Subtitled ‘nine lives,’ MacDonald describes Divinity Bash as ‘a play in three acts for five men, three women and a hermaphrodite.’ It is a play where gender and social place shift and rebuild like sand dunes in a desert-as if the nine Muses threw a party at which Cassandra was the only guest.

Divinity Bash is a play in which everything, and therefore nothing, is sacred: sterile aliens abduct the unemployed while their boyfriends leave their wives and pour out their grief and longing by singing sentimental pop music at Karaoke bars. It struts and frets its absurdities on a stage of collapsing and colliding walls; between the hell that is the here and now of the late 20th century and the possibility of a heaven far off at the horizon where the sea meets the sky like the converging pages of an open book: the edge of the margin one can always see, always move toward, but never get to. Divinity Bash is a damn good way to say goodbye to the century.