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Social Acupuncture Paperback – Illustrated, March 8 2006
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Darren O'Donnell
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Theatre doesn’t have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O’Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, isn’t really a show; it’s an interactive chitchat about memory, depression, and 9/11, a dazzling whirl of talking streetcars, pizza and schizophrenia. And it’s hilarious.
O’Donnell’s artistic practice has evolved into ‘something as close to hanging out as you can come and still charge admission.’ With his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, O’Donnell has generated a series of ongoing events that induce interactions between strangers in public; the Talking Creature, Q&A, Home Tours, the Toronto Strategy Meetings and Diplomatic Immunities bring people together in odd configurations, ask revealing questions and prove the generosity,abundance and power of the social sphere.
Social Acupuncture includes the full text of A Suicide-Site Guide to the City and an extensive essay on the waning significance of theatre and the notion of civic engagement and social interaction as an aesthetic.
‘No other playwright working in Toronto right now has O’Donnell’s talent for synthesizing psychosocial, artistic and political random thoughts and reflectionsinto compelling analyses … The world (not to mention the theatre world) could use more of this, if only to get us talking and debating.’
– The Globe and Mail
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Print length160 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherCoach House Books
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Publication dateMarch 8 2006
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Dimensions12.7 x 1.27 x 19.05 cm
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ISBN-101552451704
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ISBN-13978-1552451700
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Review
ODonnell has been testing his theory for a few years now through Mammalian Diving Reflex, the theatre company made up of himself and producer Naomi Campbell. Although they started out unpromisingly with the play White Mice, a heavy-handed satire of racism that just looked like old-fashioned didactic theatre, since 2003 theyve been up to newer and more interesting tricks, with a string of unusual projects aimed at what ODonnell calls civic engagement, delineated in his essay. Most of these acts of social acupuncture essentially involve groups of participants approaching and talking to strangers in public places, generating dialogue that has no overt purpose beyond getting to know people and whats on their minds, with the ground rule that any question can be asked but no question has to be answered. Its a benignly radical gesture in an urban society that enshrines privacy, but, according to ODonnell, more often than not strangers are willing and eager to submit to the impromptu Q&As. The companys other offbeat projects verge on being humorous social experiments, such as recreating the teenage rituals of spin the bottle and back-of-the-bus necking, using adult volunteers, or empowering children by putting adults in a hairdressers chair and letting kids wield the scissors.
But is any of this theatre, you ask? ODonnells challenge has been to bring this civic engagement back to the stage, which has led to Mammalian Diving Reflexs most recent project, Diplomatic Immunities, a combination of videotaped encounters outside the theatre and further live interaction with an audience. It culminated this past winter in Calgary with a series of well-received performances at Alberta Theatre Projects during that companys annual playRites festival, although, as ODonnell himself admits, It still remains to be seen if all of this [activity] will result in compelling entertainment.
And that brings us to the second part of the book, the text of his 2004 play A Suicide-Site Guide to the City, which finds ODonnell trying to apply his ideas-and particularly his distaste with the artifice of representational theatre-to the format of a solo show. In this rambling monologue punctuated with video, sound and lighting effects, actor ODonnell refuses to act (or, if he does, he quickly points it out to us); instead, he deconstructs his own writing, playing with the stage illusion of spontaneously addressing an audience when his words have been scripted well in advance. Certainly, the ubiquitous autobiographical solo play is a ripe target for subversion, and some of ODonnells random musings are compelling and entertaining, but ultimately his anti-theatre tactics here do little more than hint at the creative alternative of a work like Diplomatic Immunities. And for those bent on self-slaughter and wondering if there are better Toronto options than the Bloor Street Viaduct, the play signally fails to deliver on the promise of its title.
Martin Morrow (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
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About the Author
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Product details
- Publisher : Coach House Books; 1st edition (March 8 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 160 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1552451704
- ISBN-13 : 978-1552451700
- Item weight : 227 g
- Dimensions : 12.7 x 1.27 x 19.05 cm
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Best Sellers Rank:
#100,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #29 in Playwriting (Books)
- #32 in Playwriting in Theatre
- #41 in Canadian Dramas & Plays
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Darren O’Donnell is an urban cultural planner, novelist, essayist, playwright, filmmaker, performance director and the Artistic and Founding Director of Mammalian Diving Reflex. He holds a BFA in theatre and a M.Sc. in urban planning from the University of Toronto and studied traditional Chinese Medicine at the Shiatsu School of Canada. His books include: Your Secrets Sleep with Me (2004), a novel about difference, love and the miraculous, Social Acupuncture (2006), which argues for aesthetics of civic engagement, and Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract (2018), which proposes the cultural sector as a site to pilot a new social contract with children. As an urban cultural planning his focus is on participation and, in particular, the radical engagement of children and young people at the core of cultural institutions. Past and current planning collaborators include the Humboldt Forum, the Tate Modern, the West Kowloon Cultural District, the London International Festival of Theatre, the Metropolitan Region of Rhine-Neckar, the Schauspielhaus Bochum and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
