September 1st at the Stratford Perth Museum, Stratford, Ontario
On Tuesday September 1st, come join us for what would have been James Reaney’s 100th birthday in Stratford at the Stratford Perth Museum. James Reaney wasknown as “Jamie” to friends and family, and we have been calling our year-long celebration of his centenary #Jamie2026.
There will be a pop-up exhibit celebrating his life and work and a chance for family and friends to share memories from his autobiographical writingand other memoirs. Later we plan to pass the mic so others can share their memories of Jamie.
Tea and coffee will be served, and of course, there will be cake!
Jamie Reaney: A Celebration When: Tuesday September 1st from 1-3pm Where: Co-operators Performance Theatre, Stratford Perth Museum Address: 4275 Huron Road, Stratford, Ontario, N5A 6S6 Tel: 519-393-5311 Admission is by donation.
Kelly MacIntosh, the Museum’s Managing Director, has a special request if you are planning to come:
Planning to join us? An RSVP isn’t required, but it helps us plan for the afternoon. And if you have a memory, story or favourite excerpt from Jamie’s work you’d like to share, let us know: E-mail: kelly@stratfordperthmuseum.ca
Collections Coordinator Reagan MacMillan with James Stewart Reaney at the Stratford Perth Museum, August 2026July 1967 in Stratford, Ontario: The Alphabet Players with the marionettes from Apple Butter, James Reaney (centre, seated) is holding some of the Red Riding Hood marionettes. Allan Stratton (far right) is holding Apple Butter, and James Stewart Reaney (second in on the left) is holding Solomon Spoilrod.August 1965 in Leith, Ontario: James Reaney holds marionette Apple Butter with his children James Stewart, John, and Susan.Jamie Reaney with school friends at a birthday party in 1935 near Stratford.James Reaney (far right) with his cousins, Elsie, Kathleen, and Mary, Summer 1930 near Stratford, Ontario.James Reaney feeding the chickens (age 5) with his cousins Mary and Elsie (Summer 1931)
James Reaney: Listening to the Wind at Central Branch, September 3
Join us on Thursday September 3, 7:00 pm for a special screening of James Reaney: Listening to the Wind at London Public Library, Central Branch. This event is part of #Jamie2026, our year-long celebration of James Reaney’s centenary.
Directed in 1996 by Mark McCurdy of Lockwood Films [1], the film is both a biography and an exploration of James Reaney and his work, and features interviews with James Reaneyas well as with many who knew him and worked with him: Western University colleagues Richard Stingle and Stan Dragland, director Keith Turnbull and actor Jerry Franken, director Marti Maraden, composer John Beckwith, and historian and former Listeners’ Workshop member Hilary Neary.
James Reaney in 1995 in London, Ontario. Photo courtesy the London Free Press.
In a 1995 interview in the London Free Press, James Reaney said that he wrote The Donnelly Trilogy because “We have to search for the pivotal stories that constitute our own myths and legends. Your country and your community dies if you don’t tell tales about its heart and soul.”[2]
Nancy Johnson, the film’s producer, will be on hand to answer questions about the making of the film.
James Reaney: Listening to the Wind (1996 by Lockwood Films)James Reaney at the farm near Stratford, 1996.
Where: London Public Library Central Branch, 251 Dundas Street, London, Ontario.
October 20, 2013: Actor and director David Ferry gives the 4th annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture in Stratford, Ontario.
On October 20, 2013, we were fortunate to have actor and director David Ferry, who was a founding member of the NDWT Co. and has been in all three of James Reaney’s Donnelly plays, give the 2013 James Reaney Memorial Lecture at the Stratford Public Library in Stratford, Ontario.
This September, David Ferry joins us again in Stratford at the Stratford Perth Museum for #Jamie2026 – a celebration of James Reaney’s centenary. More details to be announced soon!
Meanwhile, here is a look back at David Ferry’s 2013 lecture on “Directing Reaney: From Black Feet to Main Street”:
(Excerpt from David Ferry’s transcript of his lecture)
When Sticks and Stones, The Donnellys, Part One first opened at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1973, its effect on the theatrical life of the city and country was profound. As the Toronto Star opined, it was “just plain overwhelming.” Its success led to the production of the next two parts of the trilogy the following season at Tarragon, St. Nicholas Hotel and Handcuffs, and then all three plays toured from sea to sea.
As a young actor in that original Sticks and Stones forty years ago, I was in so many ways formed as an artist by that experience, and I still self- identify as a Reaney-ite. Doing the Donnelly plays certainly confirmed me in my Canadian nationalism.
It’s ironic that I am giving this lecture exactly forty years after the first day of rehearsals for that production. A few months ago, I celebrated this fortieth anniversary by directing a production of Sticks and Stones in Quebec with a young cast of actors. And we lost an actor day before opening, so guess who went on as Pat Farl and Donavan and others?
It was so weird saying those lines, dancing that fight in that play forty years later, which I had also directed.
At the end of the third act dream sequence, after Mrs Donnelly says “Jennie, your father and I will never leave Biddulph” we freeze frame on that snapshot and then from the gods two dead oak leaves float to the ground … dead leaf, float light….
It is a special moment.
It was humbling for me to see what a profound effect the play had on that group of young artists. What a great training ground the play can be, and how forty years on the experience of staging the play served as a unifier for a new community, a new generation of theatre artists.
Today, I would like to share some thoughts on the evolution of community in Reaney’s Donnelly Trilogy. I title this fourth annual Reaney lecture: Blackfeet to Main Street.
>>> Read the full version of David Ferry’s 2013 lecturehere.
Jerry Franken and David Ferry in Sticks and Stones, at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, 1973
Summer 1937: James Reaney (age 10) picking gooseberries with his cousins in Erin Township in Wellington County, Ontario.
The “Berry-picking” scene from Act I of James Reaney’s 1967 play Colours in the Dark uses a pattern poem in the shape of a family tree pyramid to help the berry-pickers bring back the lost child.
8. BERRY-PICKING
MOTHER: The Story of the Berry-Picking Child and the Bear.
SCREEN: A child’s drawing of a berry-picking woods.
PA: This happened early near the Little Lakes.
KIDS: Darting about with berry pails
Look at the raspberries Wild Gooseberries Huckleberries Over here! Look at the raspberries Wild currants. Don’t eat them. They’re poison. Bunch berries (ugh!)
One child is left busily picking. Her name is SADIE.
GRAMP: as a bear. Enters and lifts up a child. Child my cubs need nurse. I need your blood. SADIE: Wouldn’t blood-red berries do instead? GRAMP: No. Flesh must be my bread.
SADIE: Put me down Mr. Bear. I do thee dread.
Bear runs off with child, kids enter shrieking.
KIDS: A bear ran off with Sadie! A bear ran off with Sadie! And it takes a lot of people to produce one child.
They form a family tree pyramid with a reappearing Sadie.
KIDS:
It takes Two parents Four Grandparents Eight Great grandparents Sixteen Great great grandparents Thirty-two Great great great grandparents Sixty-four Great great great great grandparents One hundred and twenty-eight Great great great great great grandparents Two hundred and fifty-six Great great great great great great grandparents Five hundred and twelve Great great great great great great great grandparents One thousand and twenty-four Great great great great great great great great grandparents
It would take over a thousand people to do this scene: at Listeners’ Workshop we did it with thirty-two people: the children here are suggested by a triangle arrangement, the thousand ancestors behind each human being. Have one group of players in charge of chanting “Great great” & “grandparents”.
SADIE: Are you there 1,024 ancestors?
A feeble rustle
Are you there 512 Are you there 256
Are you there 128
Sound gets louder, less ghost-like and more human.
Are you there 64
Are you there 32
Are you there 16
More recent ancestors step forward and say firmly and clearly what we have only dimly heard: “We’re here.”
Are you there 8
Are you there 4
Are you there Mother and Father?
GRAMP, MA and PA step forward and establish the next scene as the kids fade away
James Reaney’s “I know an experience” is the 24th brush stroke from the multi-part poem “Brush Stokes Decorating a Fan.”
(x) I know an experience That brings my 2 butterfly wings Tight together Then open Now shut Dull blur Sudden bright. Over the years our selves Have been blended By all this together, Pleated & unpleating, Opening & closing, Tight together, Loose apart— Two sides of a breath
Stephen Holowitz (piano), Sonja Gustafson (soprano), Oliver Whitehead (guitar), and Ingrid Crozman (flute), November 15, 2020 at Wordsfest in London, Ontario.
Thanks to Josh Lambier and the Words Festival for sharing this music-poem marvel from the virtual 2020 James Reaney (1926-2008) Memorial Lecture. This is an online event in #Jamie2026, the year-long celebration of James Reaney’s centenary. James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney would have been 100 years old on September 1st.
AlvegoRoot’s Take the Big Picture returns on Saturday June 27th.
AlvegoRoot Theatre’s adaptation of James Reaney’sTake the Big Picture returns for an encore performance on Saturday June 27th at 2:00 pm at the Manor Park Memorial Hall in London.
Director Adam Corrigan Holowitz says “If you missed the play, now is your chance to see this off-the-wall comedy that left audiences buzzing. If you saw the play already, you can now see it again — we have already had several repeat audience members.”
“It was very exciting to experience audiences engaging with this play, and it became clear that this unusual tale is a story for adults told as if it were a children’s story. Within this playful, hilarious, and sprawling epic, Reaney explores many contemporary issues with sharp and generous humour.”
When: Saturday June 27 at 2:00 pm Where: The Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street West
AlvegoRoot Theatre’s Take the Big Picture June 10-14
June 10-14 at Fanshawe Pioneer Village, Alvegoroot Theatre presents Take the Big Picture, a two-act play based on James Reaney’s 1986 children’s novel. Director Adam Corrigan Holowitz describes his adaptation as a story about a family in conflict with the modern world:
The story: The Delahay family is more than a little off balance and seventeen-year-old Colin is doing everything he can to keep his family heading in a somewhat logical direction. The chaos devised by his little brothers, “The Terrible Triplets”, sends his mother into a nervous breakdown and their grandmother banishes the rest of the family to British Columbia.
Safe from the temptations of the modern world, Colin begins reforming his brothers and persuades his father to learn to drive. Now the family is racing down the Trans-Canada back to London, before their house falls in the river and the frayed ends of their lives unravel beyond repair.
The characters: Most of the responsibility for getting the family through their trials and tribulations falls to the eldest son, 17-year-old Colin. It is the stories Colin tells which begins to bring the family back together.
Four intrepid actors play all the characters. The combinations of characters that the actors portray is very intentional. Tina Sterling plays both Grandmother and all three Triplets who operate like a playful three-headed monster. This highlights both the contrasts between these characters and also the similarities in how the Triplets and Grandmother are extremely independent and self-determined.
Taylor Bogaert plays both Andre, the father, and Colin, the son, and in that we see how father and son are similar but also that they belong to different generations. Over the course of the play Andre comes to realize that there are parts of the modern world that he will never understand. The Delahays are eccentric and unmanageable and the actor’s task of depicting the family onstage carries the same frenetic energy as the family themselves. My hope is that this will be equally as thrilling for the audience and actors.
The play will be performed indoors in the Historic Village Hall and goes on rain or shine!
Written and directed by Adam Corrigan Holowitz.
Performed byTaylor Bogaert, Alexandrea Marsh, Kydra Ryan, andTina Sterling.
Where: The Historic Village Hall at Fanshawe Pioneer Village, 1424 Clarke Road, London, Ontario.
When: Evening performances on Wednesday June 10 to Friday June 12 at 7:30 pm; Matinees on Saturday June 13 and Sunday June 14 at 3:00 pm.
James Stewart Reaney celebrates London’s 200th with the Forest City Fact for his father, playwright James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney and his mother, poet Colleen Thibaudeau Reaney. May 13, 2026 in Gibbons Park in London, Ontario. (Photo by Josh Lambier)
In celebration of London’s bicentennial, the City of London launched the first Forest City Facts earlier this week at Gibbons Park on the Thames River. Each lawn sign displays a short historical fact about London people, places, and events.
Look for Forest City Facts along the Thames Valley Parkway, in green spaces and community centres and at events throughout the city during the bicentennial year.
For more about London’s bicentennial and Forest City Facts — and how you can submit your own Forest City Fact — see the City of London’sCelebrating 200 Years page.
This photo taken by Shieky Brownstone in 2000 shows James (Jamie) Crerar Reaney and Colleen Thibaudeau Reaney in their backyard at 276 Huron Street in London, Ontario (Courtesy LMHS).
For more about the Forest City Facts event, see these news stories:
To celebrateNational Poetry Month, here is the “April” eclogue from James Reaney’s long poem A Suit of Nettles.
April
ARGUMENT: With Duncan as judge the geese hold a bardic contest in honour of Spring.
[DUNCAN RAYMOND VALANCY]
Here is a kernel of the hardest winter wheat
Found in the yard delicious for to eat.
It I will give to that most poetic gander
Who this season sings as well as swam Leander.
The white geese with their orange feet on the green
Grass that grew around the pond’s glassy sheen
Chose then Valancy and Raymond to sing
And to hear them gathered about in a ring.
RAYMOND
I speak I speak of the arable earth,
Black sow goddess huge with birth;
Cry cry killdeers in her fields.
Black ogress ate her glacier lover
When the sun killed him for her;
The white owl to the dark crow yields.
Caw caw whir whir bark bark
We’re fresh out of Noah’s Ark;
Wild geese come in arrowheads
Shot from birds dead long ago
Buried in your negro snow;
Long water down the river sleds.
Black begum of a thousand dugs,
A nation at each fountain tugs;
The forests plug their gaps with leaves.
Whet whet scrape and sharpen
Hoes and rakes and plows of iron;
The farmer sows his sheaves.
Mr Sword or Mr Plow
Can settle in your haymow,
All is the same to Mother Ground.
Great goddess I from you have come,
Killdeer crow geese ditch leaf plowman
From you have come, to you return
In endless laughing weeping round.
VALANCY
Your limbs are the rivers of Eden.
From the dead we see you return and arise,
Fair girl; lost daughter:
The swallows stream through the skies,
Down dipping water,
Skimming ground, and from chimney’s foul dusk
Their cousins the swifts tumble up as the tusk
Of roar day
In bright May
Scatters them gliding from darkness to sun-cusp.
Your face unlocks the bear from his den.
The world has come in to the arms of the sun.
What now sulky earth?
All winter you lay with your face like a nun,
But now bring forth
From river up boxdrain underground
Fish crawling up that dark street without sound
To spawn
In our pond
Young suckers and sunfish within its deep round.
Your body is a bethlehem.
Come near the sun that ripened you from earth
Pushing south winds
Through lands without belief till its pretty birth
The faithful finds:
Fanatic doves, believing wrens and orioles
Devoted redwinged blackbirds with their calls,
Archilochus alexandri,
Melospiza georgiana,
All surround you with arched cries of Love’s triumphals.
Your mind is a nest of all young things, all children
Come to this meadow forest edge;
Put her together
From this squirrel corn dogtooth young sedge
And all this weather
Of the white bloodroots to be her skin
The wake robin to be her shin
Her thighs pockets
Of white violets
Her breasts the gleaming soft pearly everlasting.
For her limbs are the rivers of Eden;
Her face unlocks
The brown merry bear from his den,
From his box
The butterfly and her body is a bethlehem
Humming
With cherubim
And her mind is a cloud of all young things, all children.
The prize to this one goes cried eagerly some
And others cried that to Raymond it must come,
So that Duncan Goose turned to the plantain leaf
And chopped the prize in half with beak-thrust brief.
James Reaney, 1958
The third edition of A Suit of Nettles features charming illustrations by engraver Jim Westergard, available fromThe Porcupine’s Quill.
“Geese” Photo by Elizabeth Cooke (James Reaney’s mother), 1950 near Stratford, Ontario.Butterfly decoration by James Reaney, September 1947 (ink on yellow paper)
James Reaney at the farm near Stratford, Ontario in 1971 (TVO.org)
The Farm
James Reaney’s emblem poem “The Farm” (1969)
( ( ( 0 ) ) ) For more about James Reaney’s poems and a look back at the family farm where James Reaney grew up, see the 1971 TVOntario documentary “James Reaney” in the Canadian Writers series.
The Farm
There was a farm divided in two 1/2 of it surly brick maker owned swale & slough clay & stiff Into this from the western half Jutted an orchard of 50 young trees Captain Grape Arbour & Major Mulberry Angel greening trees in whitewashed trunks Roods & perches fought clayhole & swamp & the lawns won, the gravel pit’s gone Now the farm’s one.
James Reaney, 1969
(Note: “Roods & perches” are land survey measurements.)
On Tuesday September 1st, come join us for what would have been James Reaney’s 100th birthday in Stratford at the Stratford Perth Museum. James Reaney was known as “Jamie” to friends and family, and we have been calling our year-long celebration of his centenary #Jamie2026. There will be a pop-up exhibit celebrating his life and…
Join us on Thursday September 3, 7:00 pm for a special screening of James Reaney: Listening to the Wind at London Public Library, Central Branch. This event is part of #Jamie2026, our year-long celebration of James Reaney’s centenary. Directed in 1996 by Mark McCurdy of Lockwood Films [1], the film is both a biography and…
On October 20, 2013, we were fortunate to have actor and director David Ferry, who was a founding member of the NDWT Co. and has been in all three of James Reaney’s Donnelly plays, give the 2013 James Reaney Memorial Lecture at the Stratford Public Library in Stratford, Ontario. This September, David Ferry joins us…
James Reaney 