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 lecture here.
James Reaney 