AlvegoRoot Theatre presents Sleigh Without Bells: A Donnellys Story, October 22-26
On October 22-26, AlvegoRoot Theatre presents Sleigh Without Bells: A Donnellys Story — a short story by James Reaney from The Box Social and Other Stories (1996).
“The story strikes me as an interesting coda to the Donnelly Trilogy, and a few people I have talked to say they thought that it feels a bit like a portrait of the artist diving into the Donnelly story, falling in love with the people/characters and then having to leave them behind in the land of the dead/purgatory.”
Where: The Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street W, London, Ontario When:October 22, 23, and 24 at 7:30 pm and matinees at 2 pm on Saturday October 25 and Sunday October 26.
Tickets: $30 at the door or online from OnStageDirect.
James Reaney (left) directing Tomson Highway and others in a scene from Wacousta, Fall 1976 (Image courtesy Western University Archives, James Reaney fonds AFC 18)
In 1976, James Reaney began working on Wacousta!, a new play based on John Richardson’s 1832 novel. Londoners, NDWT actors, and Western students helped develop the play through a series of workshops directed by Reaney at the University of Western Ontario’s Drama Workshop.
Playwright Tomson Highway, who was studying at Western that fall, was a member of the workshop and the Cree language coach for the play. In a later reflection on “Our Own Literature,” he recalls his early days and how the impetus to write plays came from the discovery that other Canadian writers such as Margaret Laurence wrote about what they knew.
“I was born into an oral culture and an oral language (Cree). Up where I come from, caribou country, the extreme far north of the province of Manitoba […] there is no written language, certainly no English, French, or any other European language. […]”
At age 20 while studying at the University of Manitoba, he “…came upon the writings of Margaret Laurence, whose stories took place in Neepawa, Manitoba, mere miles west of Winnipeg, a town I’d travelled through and whose cemetery I’d seen, from a distance many times and I thought that that stone angel in the imagined cemetery (never having seen it up close) must surely be the most magical stone angel in the history of the universe. […]”
“And then later on of course I met him in the flesh – shook his hand! – I met the poet/playwright James Reaney who wrote about London, Ontario where I was going to university. And then there was Michel Tremblay, over in Montreal, with that country-and-western goddess Carmen, singing her songs of love and sorrow on “the Main.”
“Well that was it. I decided that when I grew up I was gonna be like James Reaney and Michel Tremblay and Margaret Laurence and all the rest of them. I was gonna write stories that took place among my people inside the mythology of my people, vibrant, colourful – every bit as vibrant and colourful and passionate (yes, and tragic, sometimes) as people in New York and London (England) and Paris and Moscow. Yes, I decided, we were gonna have our own literature…in Cree.” [Excerpted from Reading Writers Reading: Canadian Authors” Reflections, Danielle Schaub – Photographer and Editor, University of Alberta Press and The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006, page 48.]
For more about Tomson Highway and his plays The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and Kiss of the Fur Queen, see tomsonhighway.ca and the Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia.
For more about the Wacousta Workshops (Fall 1976 to Spring 1977) at Western in London, Ontario, see James Reaney’s play Wacousta![A melodrama in three acts with a description of its development in workshops], Press Porcepic Limited, 1979.
Tomson Highway: lacrosse scene for Wacousta, Fall 1976 (Image courtesy Western University Archives, James Reaney fonds AFC 18)Tomson Highway and others — Wacousta workshops, Fall 1976 (Image courtesy Western University Archives, James Reaney fonds AFC 18)
Sometimes when I hold Our faded old globe That we used at school To see where oceans were And the five continents, The lines of latitude and longitude, The North Pole, the Equator and the South Pole— Sometimes when I hold this Wrecked blue cardboard pumpkin I think: here in my hands Rest the fair fields and lands Of my childhood Where still lie or still wander Old games, tops and pets; A house where I was little And afraid to swear Because God might hear and Send a bear To eat me up; Rooms where I was as old As I was high; Where I loved the pink clenches, The white, red and pink fists Of roses; where I watched the rain That Heaven’s clouds threw down In puddles and rutfuls And irregular mirrors Of soft brown glass upon the ground. The school globe is a parcel of my past, A basket of pluperfect things. And here I stand with it Sometime in the summertime All alone in an empty schoolroom Where about me hang Old maps, an abacus, pictures, Blackboards, empty desks. If I raise my hand No tall teacher will demand What I want. But if someone in authority Were here, I’d say Give me this old world back Whose husk I clasp And I’ll give you in exchange The great sad real one That’s filled Not with a child’s remembered and pleasant skies But with blood, pus, horror, death, stepmothers, and lies.
James Reaney, 1949
“The School Globe” is from The Red Heart (1949), James Reaney’s first book of poems.
At The Congress Café in Austin, Texas, A group of men & women came in, Workers in some state office. They ordered drinks, then meals. After just twenty minutes, You could hear the drink they’d drunk Suddenly, happily, speak out in them. This sound of community went on until we left. I have no doubt that afterwards The drink they had taken Coupled some of them in matching ecstasies On Murphy beds.
How many things seek their voice in us? Unsuspected demons & angels Wait for the arrangement we provide Of gut, enzyme, funny bone, nervous system, mind.
Blood we lost long ago? (On Frederick’s great battle field When first he conquered Angria) Seeking to recirculate once more?
The apples of the orchard young Elmer Scheerer’s Father planted Which his son pressed into cider barrels, then drank Which then became his wild mouth organ music Played from a Pippin tree top, or (husband) on wilder bed spring, Printing press of his sons, Stanley & Geordie, Early friends of mine, O Congress Café.
James Reaney, 2005
“New mouth organ in the orchard” Woodcut on paper by James Reaney (1988)
“The Congress Café” is from Souwesto Home, a collection of James Reaney’s poems from 2005 available from Brick Books.
( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Jeff Culbert read “The Congress Café” and other poems from Souwesto Home here.
In the 1976 Alumni Gazette (UWO) article “Souwesto Theatre: A Beginning” excerpted here, James Reaney describes the years he spent researching the Biddulph Tragedy of February 4, 1880 and how the knowledge he gained about the Donnellys’ world helped create the Donnelly trilogy.
Orlo Miller, who wrote the historical book The Donnellys Must Die (1962), had based his research on local courthouse documents of the time. Miller’s collection of relevant documents was available to Reaney at the University of Western Ontario’s Regional Archives:
“One of my early experiences back here* […] was to go with my father to hear Orlo Miller lecture at Middlesex College on his recent book The Donnellys Must Die.As a child I had heard the story of this tragic family from our hired man, and my interest was revived now, especially when I heard that Mr. Miller had, in the thirties, collected a huge heap of legal and municipal documents with relevance to the Biddulph Tragedy from the attics of the courthouses at Goderich and at London […]. [In the archives] I entered the really magic world of the past which can only be reached through such fragile ladders and windows as bundles of counterfoils from Sheriff’s cheque books, Court Criers’ Bills, Surveyors’ Notebooks, Chattel Mortgages (whole inventories of people’s furniture and beasts and implements), Jury Lists, Assessment Rules, Crown Attorney Letterbooks and, last of all, mountains of blue paper containing an endless stream of Information and Complaint – the term used for the form you had to fill out when some fellow pioneer had dogged your cattle, tried to pour boiling water on you, torn down your fence, milked your cow furtively or torn down your house with you inside. [Alumni Gazette 1976, pages 14-15]
One of my first research lessons was to train myself to read nineteenth century handwriting and abbreviations; for example, for about a year I somehow assumed that “Inft” meant “infant” so that when you read “.… and poured boiling water over the Inft” I naturally saw the very darkest picture imaginable; suddenly one day it dawned on me that the early Huron District backwoods scene was indeed horrible, but that “Inft” did at least stand for an Informant fifty years old and perfectly capable of running away! Now these documents where a Plaintiff accuses a Defendant of doing something are extremely dramatic, partly because of the variety of things accused, and I made them into one of the choral passages in Sticks and Stones (Part One) in order to show the social situation at its tumultuous litigious mad worst, which is always the dramatic best! [.…] Propelled by the magnetic names “Donnelly” and “Biddulph” I read all the Huron District and County Archives from the beginning to 1863 when Biddulph Township leaves Huron County; I knew that I wanted to write a play about these people, but I wanted to get inside their world first and those hundreds of boxes filled with blue paper – it gets white about 1870 – were the keys to this state. Whoever filed away things in the Huron County Courthouse filed away everything, and I am eternally grateful […]. [H]ere you often get pictures of whole families talking at each other in a way that no history book ever thinks of showing you: one of my favourite lines from the trilogy – “It’s not enough that we should starve, but we must freeze to death as well” – comes right out of a Chancery document. [Alumni Gazette 1976, page 15]
Now there is probably a reason for this material being dear to a dramatist’s heart; a court case is after all a drama – with its lawyers arguing so one-sidedly against each other, with its witnesses opposing each other too and with a Judge, who quite frequently in the early days, climaxes everything with a knock on the head or wallet all around! If at the time you were to have taken a Constable’s Bill to the constable who had just filled it out and told him that it would make a good scene in a play he would have laughed at such foolishness. But time going by changes all that and scholars and artists have as their duty the finding out of just how time does give ordinary things meaning. After the five years were over and I found myself with Five Legal Blue Binders with transcribed material, I found that the three plays of The Donnellys corresponded to three of these binders. All – all!?, I had to do was pare things down from 200 hours of dialogue and action to three hours per binder! [Alumni Gazette 1976, page 15]
After a series of workshops with my own group, the Listeners, at Alpha Centre and Mini-Theatre, where we used this material in prototypes of the Donnelly plays called “Antler River” and “Sticks and Stones”, I did some more shaping until in 1972 I was invited down to Halifax to work with Keith Turnbull, a former student here on the material using local children and professional actors. The actors wolfed down the contents of the binders – and I think that in their performances you can see that they have genuinely touched some area of time not our own […]. [Alumni Gazette 1976, page 15]
This article originally appeared in Western’s Alumni Gazette in 1976 (pages 14-16). Read the full article here.
Miriam Greene, Patricia Ludwick, Jerry Franken, and David Ferry in James Reaney’s Sticks and Stones at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, 1973.
* In 1960 James Reaney left his first teaching post at the University of Manitoba and came to teach in the Faculty of English at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario: “One of the reasons I decided to leave my first teaching post in Manitoba and come to this campus was that I wanted to find out more about the land of my birth – Southwestern Ontario, or as Greg Curnoe very aptly calls it – Souwesto.” [page 14]
Souwesto history continues to inspire local playwrights: Jeff Culbert has written a one-man musical version The Donnelly Sideshow, Chris Doty restaged The Donnelly Trial in 2006, and Paul Thompson wrote The Outdoor Donnellys (2001) and The Last Donnelly Standing (2016).
Gil Garratt as Robert Donnelly in The Last Donnelly Standing (Photo by Terry Manzo courtesy The Blyth Festival 2016.)
Thank you for joining us at Wordsfest on November 6th to hear author Terry Griggs read the late Stan Dragland’s essay on his forthcoming bookJames Reaney On the Grid. We were honoured to have Terry give voice to Stan’s words and illuminate his thoughts on James Reaney.
Terry Griggs at Museum London, November 6, 2023
Many thanks to Wordsfest for hosting the lecture and to Josh Lambier and Greg de Souza for their help in launching the presentation.
November 6, 2023: Moderator James Stewart Reaney takes questions for Terry Griggs.
( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Link to an archived recording of the lecture here. The text for Stan Dragland’s essay is available here.
Stan Dragland (1942-2022)Stan Dragland’s book James Reaney on the Grid will be published in 2023
The James Reaney Memorial Lecture series celebrates the life and work of Southwestern Ontario poet and dramatist James Reaney, who was born on a farm near Stratford, Ontario and found a creative home in London, Ontario.
Our thanks to Wordsfest and the London Public Library for their support of the lecture series, and to Poetry Stratford and the Stratford Public Library for their support in hosting the earlier lectures (2010-2015).
“Near Fraserburg” Watercolour painting by James Reaney, Fall 1985September 1975: James Reaney at the Nihilist Picnic, Poplar Hill, Ontario
There are two events celebrating the work of dramatist James Reaney this month and next:
Patricia Nacamoto as Mattie Medal in Gyroscope: “Is it true, Gregory La Selva, is it true that one of the conditions of your marriage was that, were that you were never, never to read her stuff?”
October 28-30 and November 4-6: James Reaney’s play Gyroscope, directed by Adam Corrigan Holowitz and presented by AlvegoRoot Theatre.
All performances at Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street, London, Ontario.
( ( 0 ) ) Listen to an interview with Adam Corrigan Holowitz and Janis Nickleson (who played Hilda La Selva in the 1981 production of Gyroscope!): Gyroscope Conversations on Soundcloud
November 6 at 12:00 noon at Wordsfest: The James Reaney Memorial Lecture at Museum London. Terry Griggs, author and former student of the late Stan Dragland (1942-2022), will present “James Reaney Off the Grid”, the lecture Stan had planned to give.
Wordsfest is at Museum London, 421 Ridout Street North, London, Ontario.
Sunday November 6 at 12:00 pm EDT — Join us in-person or by webinar at Wordsfest for the 13th Annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture. We are honoured to have Terry Griggs, author and former student of the late Stan Dragland, present “James Reaney Off the Grid”, the lecture Stan had planned to give.
Stan Dragland (1942-2022)
For Dragland, the lecture he gave at Wordsfest in 2019 only scratched the surface of what he wanted to say about James Reaney’s work. “In my previous lecture I pointed out that he was only sometimes limited as an artist by the grids he so loved. Today I want to stress the Reaney who knew how important it is to be able to pry or bounce one’s mind outside of inherited, imprisoning systems, who knew how to improvise, who could make plays out of the simplest things he found in his own environment.”
When: Sunday November 6 at 12:00 pm Where: Wordsfest at Museum London, 421 Ridout Street North, London, Ontario
The James Reaney Memorial Lecture series celebrates the life and work of Southwestern Ontario poet and dramatist James Reaney, who was born on a farm near Stratford, Ontario and found a creative home in London, Ontario.
We were saddened to learn of writer, editor, and literary critic Stan Dragland’s passing earlier this month. Stan Dragland was a colleague of James Reaney’s at Western University (1970-1989) and a mentor and champion to writers and poets across Canada.
James Reaney on the Grid, an expanded version of Stan Dragland’s 2019 James Reaney Memorial Lecture, will be available later this fall from The Porcupine’s Quill.
From the Introductory section: This started out as the tenth annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture. It was delivered in London, Ontario, on November 2, 2019. That version turns out to have only scratched the surface of what I’ve been finding to say about Reaney’s literary career. As the talk grew into what it is now, it became ever clearer to me that Reaney’s legacy includes one unmistakable masterpiece, the Donnelly trilogy, a play in three parts so magnificent that it stands, or ought to stand, with the work of literary greats anywhere. But there are many other works of real importance, plus a few that may perhaps be worth reading only to someone like me, interested in all of Reaney, because of what all of it has to say about the best of his work […]
James Reaney’s translation of Pierre Falcon’s “The Battle of Seven Oaks” (“La Chanson de la Grenouillère”) can be found in Margaret Arnett MacLeod’s 1960 book Songs of Old Manitoba.
Pierre Falcon (1793-1876) was a celebrated Métis balladeer and North West Company clerk. “He had a feeling for words, a sense of rhythm, and a love of a rollicking tune. He was strongly dramatic, and his idea of the importance of the Métis Nation may have been more right than his English contemporaries were ready to concede [.…]” (MacLeod, p. 2)
Pierre Falcon’s 1816 ballad commemorating the Métis victory at the Battle of Seven Oaks (Songs of Old Manitoba, p.5)
James Reaney offers these notes on his approach to translating the song:“This translation can be sung to Pierre Falcon’s original tune with some stretching, but no more than to sing his own words requires. In making this translation I have followed Ezra Pound’s practice. Since there can be no translation so inaccurate as that which sticks closely and literally to the surface of a song, I have attempted to make only an English equivalent of Falcon’s ballad and so translate the really important thing – its high spirits.” (MacLeod, p. 9)
1. Would you like to hear me sing Of a true and recent thing? It was June 19, the band of Bois-Brûlés Arrived that day, Oh the brave warriors they!
2. We took three foreigners prisoners when We came to the place called Frog, Frog Plain. There were men who’d come from Orkney, Who’d come, you see, To rob our country.
3. Well we were just about to unhorse When we heard two of us give, give voice. Two of our men cried, “Hey! Look back, look back! The Anglo-Sack Coming for to attack.”
4. Right away smartly we veered about Galloping at them with a shout! You know we did trap all, all those Grenadiers! They could not move Those horseless cavaliers.
5. Now we like honourable men did act, Sent an ambassador – yes, in fact! “Monsieur Governor! Would you like to stay? A moment spare — There’s something we’d like to say.”
6. Governor, Governor, full of ire. “Soldiers!” he cries, “Fire! Fire.” So they fire first and their muskets roar! They almost kill Our ambassador!
7. Governor thought himself a king. He wished an iron rod to swing. Like a lofty lord he tries to act. Bad luck, old chap! A bit too hard you whacked!
8. When we went galloping, galloping by Governor thought that he would try For to chase and frighten us Bois-Brûlés. Catastrophe! Dead on the ground he lay.
9. Dead on the ground lots of grenadiers too. Plenty of grenadiers, a whole slew. We’ve almost stamped out his whole army. Of so many Five or four left there be.
10. You should have seen those Englishmen — Bois-Brûlés chasing them, chasing them, From bluff to bluff they stumbled that day While the Bois-Brûlés Shouted “Hurray!”
11. Tell, oh tell me who made up this song? Why it’s our own poet, Pierre Falcon. Yes, she was written this song of praise For the victory We won this day. Yes, she was written, this song of praise — Come sing the glory Of the Bois-Brûlés.
( ( (0) ) ) Rufin Turcottesings the original French version on this 1963 Smithsonian Folkways Recording “Folksongs of Saskatchewan”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB1knUIOSH0
From Songs of Old Manitoba, Pierre Falcon’s original French lyrics (p. 6-7)
Note: James Reaney’s long poem “A Message to Winnipeg” (1960) includes this translation of Pierre Falcon’s 1816 song. For more about the June 19, 1816 Battle of Seven Oaks, see the entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia.
