On May 24 to June 1 in London, Ontario, come and see the AlvegoRoot Theatre Company’s presentation of James Reaney’s play The Easter Egg.

The Easter Egg is directed by Jason Rip, and the performers are Kim Kaitell, Adam Corrigan Holowitz, Maya Wong, Demis Odanga, and Chris McAuley.

Jason Rip is a former student of James Reaney’s and an admirer of his work: “I feel very fortunate to have known Mr. Reaney. My ideas about him and his unique way of looking at the world — alternately whimsical and threatening, dignified yet naughty, with an emphasis on the importance of play — have infused this production. I still remember him hiding behind the curtains in University College Tower, waiting to pounce out and scare students. ‘GOTHIC NOVEL!’ he’d shout before doubling over with giggles. James Reaney is the bard of Souwesto. I will never turn down a chance to direct or appear in his work.”

When: May 24, 25, 29, 30, 31 and June 1 at 8pm; May 25 and June 1 at 2 pm
Where: The Arts Project, 203 Dundas Street, London, Ontario

To buy tickets, call 519-642-2767; Adults $15, Students and Seniors $10.

Pamela Terry Beckwith (1926-2006) directed James Reaney’s The Killdeer in 1960. He always referred to her as “my first director,” and he dedicated his second play, The Easter Egg, to her. She directed the first production of The Easter Egg for the Alumnae Theatre in November 1962.

Here are James Reaney’s thoughts about The Easter Egg from the Preface to the anthology Masks of Childhood (New Press, 1972, pages v-vi):

Behind Easter Egg literally lies a collection of glass Easter eggs I made from 1945 to 1955, aet. 19 and over. Found my first one in a store on Harbord Street, an old grocery and sundries store out of the 1910 era.[…] In Stratford, Le Souder’s Second Hand Store also kept getting a supply as attics from the eighties and nineties descended to the auctioneer’s gavel. Have never been quite sure of their cultural use; I think they were given to children at Easter. Some of them are as small as hen’s eggs and I have heard of these being used as nest eggs; others are large — a bit larger than a goose egg. Could they have been made at the Hamilton Glass Works? […] Milk glass blown or moulded, painted with flowers, rabbits, chickens (a cherub hatching out of one I didn’t buy), glowing with trapped pearly light — such glass cannot fail to set the story-telling instinct free. So a godmother gives a boy a glass Easter egg; he is drowning in an evil world and the present could float him to a shore. Someone steals the egg and the boy goes under a wave of word-blindness and numbness. Fourteen years later the Easter egg is found again and….

Bethel and her setting were suggested by stories told at an academic party in Kingston; stories about the past on a campus somewhat farther east. Nearby Garden Island supplied the ghost story of a girl tied to a fence for stealing a twig of small fruit. To my astonishment I ran across the basic for the story in the London Times,* 9 October, 1846 (No. 84). I think the heading is ‘Gooseberry Case on Garden Island’ and the owner of the gooseberries had the child brought up in court for stealing one! Confinement beneath a cellar door rather than tying to a fence was the cruelty practised.[…] I know perfectly well that in real life no one marries somebody because she got him to kill a bat; but here, in this story, they do you see.

*[London, Ontario, or London Minor as it was sometimes called.]

On April 12-27 in Toronto, The Alumnae Theatre Company will present James Reaney’s play The Killdeer, which was first produced by the Company in January 1960. The Killdeer is part of Alumnae Theatre’s “Countdown to One Hundred,” as Alumnae Theatre moves closer to celebrating its first century.

For director Barbara Larose, the play is “a story of growth and coming of age, with elements of love and innocence, a search for identity, and a courtroom drama that arises from a murder mystery.” Sound designer Rick Jones’s score, inspired by John Beckwith’s original music from the 1960 production, also includes “magical elements” — a gypsy motif for Madam Fay, bird cries, and the storm.

When: April 12-27 at 8 pm, Wednesday to Saturday
Sunday matinee at 2 pm on April 14 & 21
Where: ALUMNAE THEATRE COMPANY, 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2W6
Tel: 416-364-4170
Tickets: Wednesday: 2 FOR 1 ($20)
Thursday, Friday & Saturday: $20
Sunday Matinee: PWYC

Pamela Terry (1926-2006), who directed The Killdeer in 1960, was a member of the Alumnae Theatre and directed its first production of Waiting For Godot in 1957. She and her husband, composer  John Beckwith, were friends of James Reaney’s, and she encouraged him to write The Killdeer and persuaded the Alumnae Theatre to produce it. John Beckwith put together a background score for The Killdeer, and in his book, Unheard Of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer, he describes how he composed the score: “… following Pamela’s directorial suggestions, I improvised musical cues at the piano, as she and I devised various muting devices after the model of John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’” (see page 256).

 April 18, 2013 update: To see what reviewers are saying about Alumnae Theatre’s The Killdeer, see Stage Door, Mooney On Theatre, Cate McKim, and JBNBlog.

Actor and director David Ferry is a Guest Artist at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and he sends this good news about his work with the students of Bishop′s Drama Department:

Here′s a photo [from a scene in Act I] for your website — this is the first time we all got the Jacob′s ladders together in rehearsal!

James Reaney′s Sticks and Stones will be presented from March 14-18 at Bishop’s University. Our best wishes to the director, cast, and crew for a successful production!

Update March 17, 2013: David Ferry had this to say about the play’s opening night:

—Well it was a smash opening… gotta say the students so embraced the piece.

And ironically… 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 (all off book by the way) in that play 40 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 snap shot and then from the gods two dead oak leaves float to the ground…”dead leaf, float light”

It is a special moment.

Here are David Ferry’s program notes from Sticks and Stones:

James Reaney’s famous “Donnelly Trilogy” is arguably the greatest piece of English Canadian dramatic writing to have ever been produced in our professional theatre. Along with Michel Tremblay’s “Les Belles-soeurs” it became one of the few truly breakthrough pieces in our Canadian theatrical his/herstory. Certainly it was the crowning achievement in Reaney’s storied career.

A three time Governor General Award winning writer (winning for both poetry and drama) Reaney was really, like George Ryga, of the post Second World War generation of playwrights  that cleared the land for the younger generation of playwrights that followed.

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 nationalism. A close look at the plays will reveal what a breathtaking view Reaney had of his country. He doesn’t merely write about an infamous event in our past… the slaughter of the Donnellys by vigilantes in 1880s South Western Ontario… he writes about the creation of a new world and how the tendrils of the old world wrapped around its ankles and tried to pull, pull it down. Back into the past.

In “Sticks and Stones” Reaney  champions a family led by an extraordinary woman (Judith Donnelly) of vision and spirit. The play becomes in no small part a champion of this proto-feminist heroine.

While many of the Donnellys’ neighbours came with them from Ireland to settle in Biddulph County (around the town of Lucan,) few of them had the courage, nobility and determination of the Donnellys to create a new life that turned its back on the sectarian violence and prejudice of the Old Sod. Judith and James Donnelly were determined to start a new life that rejected the rules of the old world.

They chose their friends not by political allegiance or faith but by the strength of that person’s integrity and spirit. They set out to build a farm and a family that could grow without limitations. They taught their children to hold their heads up high. And the children did.

The Donnelly story, in Reaney’s hands, tells us of the evolution of a nation… starting with the agrarian society of those early farmer immigrants from Ireland, moving through the development of early commercialism and industry, to a political culture where the Church and political parties divided and conquered to form a modern Canada.

Reaney’s stage craft in telling HIS story is every bit as startling as his analysis of the evolution of Southwesto society.

As early as 1964 Reaney called for a National theatre that should be created in big wooden-floored rooms across the country; likely Orangemen halls or Masonic temples or Fisherman Union halls on non-meeting nights. He discussed in his 1960s journal “Alphabet” an approach ‘towards a poor theatre’ (before Grotowski) as well as an ’empty space’ and ‘Holy Theatre’ (before Brook). His plays broke through the fourth wall of Naturalism very early on in Canadian theatre, and his plays such as “Listen to the Wind” and ” Colours in the Dark” (Stratford Festival) are the antithesis of the kitchen sink naturalism of David French and others.

His Theatre is one influenced by three ring circuses, Beijing opera, Walt Disney films, puppet plays and children’s tickle trunks and magical make believe.

His stage is filled with the iconography of ladders, wheels, spinning tops, cats cradles, sticks and stones.

It may be challenging for you, the Audience, to make sense of Reaney’s story in a linear way.

It is, perhaps, best to sit back and allow the images and poetry to wash over you and overwhelm you.

Reaney once wrote that the writer’s objective should be to scratch though the bark of “local” in order to arrive at the “universal.”

With “Sticks and Stones” I believe Reaney arrived. In spades.

David Ferry was one of the original cast members of James Reaney’s The Donnellys Part I, Sticks and Stones, which was first performed at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Ontario on November 24, 1973.

Recently David edited a collection of plays by James Reaney for Playwrights Canada Press: Reaney Days in the West Room: Plays of James Reaney. Seven of James Reaney’s plays are in the book, including The Killdeer, Names and Nicknames, Listen to the Wind, The St. Nicholas Hotel, Gyroscope, Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and Zamorna!