What goes around, swims around for new Snakeskin Jacket show

If you ask Winnipeg actor-director Jane Walker which Canadian artist has most profoundly challenged her theatrical expectations, there’s no competition: the answer is Daniel MacIvor.

Walker’s admiration for the prolific MacIvor — who last appeared in Winnipeg in 2022 with his solo show Let’s Run Away at the Tom Hendry Warehouse — can be traced back to her time as a student at the University of Manitoba in the early 2000s. Instructor Chris Johnson’s reading list included MacIvor’s Never Swim Alone, a formally challenging, verbally thrilling one-act package of one-upmanship, judgment, survival and abandonment.

First produced in 1991 by Toronto’s Platform 9 Theatre, Never Swim Alone features three characters: a female referee in a bathing suit and two men in blue suits, A. Francis Delorenzo and Bill Wade, described in the show notes as “almost imperceptibly shorter” than Delorenzo.

Inspired by MacIvor’s sometime adversarial, often inspirational friendship with collaborator Ken McDougall, who directed the original run, the play pits the two men against one another in a series of obscure battles of comparison, with the referee — and the audience — determining who comes out on top in categories such as stature, uniform and “who falls dead the best.”

It didn’t take long for Walker to be inspired by the play’s metatheatrics, and she determined that some day, she would try her hand at directing it.

Over 20 years later, she’s getting her chance, helming an independent production through her company Snakeskin Jacket, whose last production was Horton Foote’s Courtship at the 2022 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival; the company’s first production, in 2006, was of MacIvor’s The Soldier Dreams. And though she’s loved the text since Johnson introduced it to her, the upcoming run of Never Swim Alone will mark the first time Walker has seen it performed professionally.

“It’s a whole different organism when you have to direct it,” says Walker, who’s brought on Ian Mikita, Jesse Bergen and Snakeskin Jacket co-founder Kerri Woloszyn as her cast.

Each performer comes from a collaborative performance background: Bergen and Woloszyn are members of improv stalwarts Club Soda (next show is Nov. 28 at the Irish Association of Manitoba’s Tara Theatre) while Mikita is the drummer for the Mariachi Ghost.

The performers are well-prepared: Snakeskin Jacket — named for a key costume in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart — was meant to perform the play during this past summer’s fringe festival, but had to cancel abruptly when an actor needed to drop out. Luckily, Walker says, the company’s would-be fringe venue, The Output at Videopool (100 Arthur St.) was happy to provide the space for a five-day run beginning today.

The production is dedicated to the late Johnson, the lynchpin of the U of M’s Black Hole Theatre, now known as the Black Hole Student Group. Tickets for the production, which runs to Sunday, are $25 at showpass.com/never-swim-alone.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca