Playwright Daniel MacIvor is a mystic at heart–which seems to embarrass him just a bit.

As he speaks to the Georgia Straight on his cellphone from his Halifax home, he discusses his newest play, His Greatness , which premieres at the Arts Club's Granville Island Stage from next Thursday (October 11) to November 10. This script imagines a character and a set of circumstances very much like Tennessee Williams on one of his visits to Vancouver in the 1970s and early '80s; he opened The Red Devil Battery Sign in 1975 and The Notebook of Trigorin in 1980, both at the Vancouver Playhouse. The Playwright, as the figure is called, is barely saved from alcohol- and cocaine-induced self-destruction by the Assistant, who hires his boss a hustler identified as the Young Man. We watch as the Playwright prepares for opening night and responds to a savaging by local critics. (In real life, The Red Devil Battery Sign was poorly received by the Vancouver press.)

Asked what frightens him most in this tale of a playwright on the skids, MacIvor responds, "That we're so wrapped up in how we're seen that we forget who we are." The Playwright falls apart after his drubbing in the press. "He goes from a feeling of triumph based on what he felt in the theatre to a sense of complete despondency based on what was written in the paper about it," MacIvor explains. "It really scares me that we're so delicate, we're such orchids."

MacIvor attributes Williams's failure at least partly to the deceased playwright's desire to please. "It feels like Williams was trying to be modern," MacIvor explains, referring to his later work. "You look at something like The Red Devil Battery Sign and it's just a steaming mass of… It just doesn't connect. It seems like he was making such an effort to do something other than the thing he was born to do." Williams is best known for poetic naturalism. MacIvor is trying something new himself: his plays are mostly deliberately artificial, so the naturalism of His Greatness is a departure.

The idea of authenticity raises the question of how MacIvor works when he's being true to his talent. His answer goes beyond the question of style. "I guess I'm a professional human," he replies. "Like, some people are astronauts and some people are doctors and some people are humans. It's about having to keep a slight–oh, this is going to sound so much like I need a therapist–but it's about keeping a slight disconnect, a healthy disconnect from life, so you can observe."

This notion of disconnection seems paradoxical because, for MacIvor, artistic creation also involves a humbling of the ego that allows one to become a conduit for a bigger force. "I believe that the work has an energy that's outside me," MacIvor says. Then he laughs and adds: "That might not look so good written down on paper."

In His Greatness , the Playwright explains the experience this way: "And from the words would come the story, rushing like a river, pulling me along with it, an ancient river, like it had been there all the time just waiting to be named."