James Reaney’s Gentle Rain Food Co-op presented by AlvegoRoot Theatre on November 22

As part of its 15th anniversary celebrations, Alvego Root Theatre will present a staged reading of James Reaney’s 1997 play Gentle Rain Food Co-op on November 22 at 7:30 pm.

Admission is by donation to The Manor Park Food Bank
non-perishable food or cash accepted.
Reserve your seat here.
Where: The Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street W, London, Ontario

November 22, 2023 — Adam Corrigan Horowitz and Kydra Ryan in Gentle Rain Food Co-op. Evil Professor Skimwater commissions a model of St. David’s Ward from unsuspecting Jones:
“By the way, Jones, my graduate class is waiting next door. I wonder if you’d mind brining your model of St. David’s Ward in for me so they can have a look at it too?”

2023 James Reaney Memorial Lecture: The Beckwith Connection

Join us on November 5, 2023 at Wordsfest at Museum London for the 14th annual James Reaney Memorial Lecture — The Beckwith Connection: An Afternoon of Big Hits from the Reaney & Beckwith Songbook.

Curated by London soprano Katy Clark, the 2023 Reaney Memorial Lecture celebrates playwright and poet James Reaney’s collaborations with a great Canadian composer, the late John Beckwith (1927-2022). Katy Clark leads a chamber ensemble into wonderful music from Beckwith as well as words from James Reaney (Jamie) and Colleen Thibaudeau. We will also celebrate the friendship of two creative couples – Jamie and Colleen and John Beckwith and Pamela Terry, as well as their families. Katy will be joined by London Pro Musica Choir, Paul Grambo, and guest artists.

Beckwith wrote four operas with Reaney, whom he met at the University of Toronto in the late 1940s. They shared a deep interest in creating and telling authentically Canadian stories with local references – both literary and musical – and universal messages.

Above: Four Reaney & Beckwith operas: Night Blooming Cereus (1960), The Shivaree (1982), Crazy to Kill (1988), and Taptoo! (1999)

About the presenter
Soprano Katy Clark has sung as a soloist and chorister with companies across North America. She is a DMA candidate at the University of Toronto, where she studies with Nathalie Paulin, and holds a Masters degree in Voice Performance from the University of Michigan. In addition to her work as a performer, Ms. Clark is the founder and artistic producer of the London-based opera company Village Opera.

When: Sunday November 5 at 2:00 pm

Where: Museum London, 421 Ridout Street, London, Ontario N6A 5H4

Register to attend in-person or join us online via Zoom at the Words Festival event page: https://wordsfest.ca/events/2023/2023-james-reaney-memorial-lecture-the-beckwith-connection

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.

Night Blooming Cereus — John Beckwith and James Reaney’s first opera

Night Blooming Cereus, a chamber opera in one act, is one of several musical collaborations between poet and playwright James Reaney (1926-2008), who wrote the libretto, and composer John Beckwith (1927-2022).

In his autobiography Unheard of: Memoirs of a Canadian Composer, John Beckwith had this to say about his first opera:

“Furthering my ambition to compose an opera, I had the great good luck to find a librettist — a writer who understood music. James Reaney shared my love of opera, and early in our friendship in student days we spoke of perhaps collaborating on an original work. In early 1953 I received from him a draft of Night Blooming Cereus. The one-act opera he imagined taking shape as a sort of southern Ontario miracle play. It turned out to be the first of four operatic works we produced together over succeeding decades…”[1]

“[…] We worked on it slowly through the mid-1950s, almost entirely by correspondence, while starting to raise families and work on tenure, he in Winnipeg and I in Toronto. No one seemed interested in staging it, but we were fortunate that CBC Radio offered a broadcast production, and, encouraged by its success, repeated it the following year. In the season 1959-60 we were supported by a small committee of friends to raise funds for a live staging of our own.”[2]

James Reaney describes meeting the demands of the composer for more variety of metre in the draft libretto of Night Blooming Cereus as being “galvanized into, at the time and for me, incredible labours of counting syllables, making parallel lines exactly the same length and finding good clean, clear and sonorous rhymes… From those Manitoba fall nights…I date my birth as a craftsman in words.” [3]

( ( 0 ) ) Listen to Night Blooming Cereus (1960 CBC Radio broadcast) on Centre Streams at the Canadian Music Centre

In Scene 2 of the opera, lonely Mrs Brown tends to her house and her Night-blooming cereus, which is due to flower that evening.

(The dishes are put away, the cupboard door closed, the dishwater somehow disposed of. She gets the broom from behind the stove.)

SWEEPING
Look at the faces on the floor
In the wood of the boards they are
Faces of dust I sweep with a broom,
Sweeping the dust in this room.
Sweeping sweeping sweeping sweeping
Has a sound like weeping
If I kept all the dust I’ve swept
It would be she I have wept
Whose face appears more often than not
In the dust and the fire and the knot,
And the blowing rain on the window
And the tree branches’ shadow
Contain your face there! and again there!
My lost girl in dust in the air.
But it is best to go on sweeping
Over the faces better than weeping.
Here is the face of an old man peeping.
Here is the face of a young man reaping.
Here is the face of an old woman sweeping.

(A bit tired with so much activity, she sits in the rocking chair.)

ROCKING
Rocking rocking, rocking rocking
Very very slowly
What I have been doing rocking,
Most of my life lately.

Sewing at a shirt or stocking
As quickly as I can
And what the people to me bring
I sew at while rocking

Like selling footsteps to all houses
My stitches go through cloth
Of caps and nightgowns and blouses
Dresses, handkerchiefs and vests.

I sew for everyone here,
I the restless stillness,
My thread looks through cloth for tear
And the butcher’s apron.

The sewing connects each one
To myself except for her.
She walks about beneath the sun
Without my sewing snow.

As the white snow fills fields and lanes,
Till they cover me all.
Upon my old and long-used bones
Rocking and sewing fall.

[1] John Beckwith in Unheard Of, page 246
[2] James Reaney in his essay “An Evening With Babble and Doodle: Presentations of poetry”, Canadian Literature 12 Spring 1962, pages 37-43
[3] John Beckwith, James Reaney on Music, 2016 James Reaney Memorial Lecture

The Donnelly Trilogy at Blyth in August

Starting August 3, all three of James Reaney’s Donnelly plays are now on at Blyth Festival.

All shows are at 8PM at Blyth Festival’s Harvest Stage.

Tickets available online or by phone: 1-877-862-5984

Part I: STICKS & STONES
Friday August 4
Tuesday August 8
Friday August 11
Tuesday August 15
Friday August 18
Tuesday August 22
Friday August 2
Tuesday August 29
Friday Sept 1
 
Part II: THE ST. NICHOLAS HOTEL
Saturday August 5
Wednesday August 9
Saturday August 12
Wednesday August 16
Saturday August 19
Wednesday August 23
Saturday August 25
Wednesday August 30
Saturday September 2

Part III: HANDCUFFS
Thursday August 3
Sunday August 6
Thursday August 10
Sunday August 13
Thursday August 17
Sunday August 20
Thursday August 24
Sunday August 27
Thursday August 31
Sunday September 3
 

James Reaney’s The Donnelly Trilogy at Blyth Festival Summer 2023

Summer 2023 — The Blyth Festival is bringing James Reaney’s The Donnelly Trilogy to Blyth’s Outdoor Harvest Stage. Director Gil Garratt has adapted the three plays especially for this outdoor setting.

The three plays, Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs will all be performed by one single company of ten actors, who will tell the tale from the killing of Patrick Farrell, to Johannah Donnelly’s march to Goderich to save her husband from the gallows, to the Stagecoach wars, to the Queen’s Hotel, to the Vigilance Society in the Cedar Swamp Schoolhouse, to the fiery February night when justice, revenge, and murder were left indistinguishable in the ashes.

This will be the first time in decades that all three of these touchstone plays have been performed in repertory with each other, affording audiences the chance to take in the whole cycle over three nights.

Gil Garratt’s thoughts on the three plays:

“I believe 2023 is the perfect time to re-ignite the telling of the Donnelly story in Blyth. At its heart, this is a story about grit, family, betrayal, the erosion of community, the rise of secret societies, the shadow of conspiracy, and the limits of faith. The show will be filled to the brim with folk music, stagecoaches, and live fire in the night.”

The Donnelly Trilogy by James Reaney
Adapted, abridged, and directed by Artistic Director Gil Garratt
Part I: Sticks and Stones, June 22-September 1
Part II: The St. Nicholas Hotel, July 13-September 2
Part III: Handcuffs, August 1-September 3

Tickets available online or by phone: 1-877-862-5984

The Blyth Festival was founded in 1975 and
is devoted to plays about Southwestern Ontario and rural Ontario.

The Blyth Festival’s replica of the Donnelly stagecoach from Paul Thompson’s 2001 play
Artistic Director Gil Garratt as Robert Donnelly in Blyth’s 2016 show The Last Donnelly Standing.


James Reaney on writing and researching the Donnelly plays

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.

For more on James Reaney’s Donnelly research, see The Donnelly Documents: An Ontario Vendetta published by The Champlain Society in 2004.

* 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.)

October and November events for James Reaney

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.

Buy tickets here: https://www.alvegoroottheatre.com/gyroscope.html

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.

Registration is free for this in-person and webinar presentation. See the Events page at Wordsfest for the link: http://wordsfest.ca/events/2022/james-reaney-off-the-grid

Stan Dragland (1942-2022)

James Reaney in 1972 courtesy Talonbooks

AlvegoRoot Theatre presents James Reaney’s play Gyroscope October 28 to November 6

October 28 to November 6 — Don’t miss AlvegoRoot Theatre‘s production of James Reaney’s play Gyroscope later this month. For Director Adam Corrigan Horowitz, this play is “a shape-shifting comedy of marriage, art and passion!”

About the play: When poet Hilda La Selva got married, she made her husband Greg swear to never read any of her poetry, a vow he inevitably fails to keep. As their relationship lists and tilts, they are pursued by an intrepid PhD student intent on putting their marriage under the microscope. 

The performers are Kydra RyanSteven Barber, Patricia NacamotoElizabeth Durand, and Dan Ebbs.

For more about the play and an excerpt from a key scene, see “James Reaney’s play Gyroscope from 1981”.

Content Advisory: Gyroscope contains sensitive content including references of suicide. If you would like more information before purchasing a ticket please contact AlvegoRoot.

Buy tickets here: https://www.alvegoroottheatre.com/gyroscope.html

October 28 at 7:30 pm
October 29 at 7:30 pm
October 30 at 4:00 pm
November 4 at 7:30 pm
November 5 7:30 pm
November 6 at 4:00 pm

All performances at Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street, London, Ontario.

James Reaney’s play Gyroscope from 1981

In this excerpt from James Reaney’s play Gyroscope, Gregory La Selva, lab technician, seeks to restore his self-esteem and win back the love of his wife, Hilda, a famous poet. To win Hilda’s respect, he must prove to her that he too can write poetry. He enlists the help of Mattie Medal, PhD student, to help him write a poem that will win him a place at the Harpers’ Poetry Guild alongside Hilda.

Scene Six: The Husband Takes a Chance on Being Skinned by Apollo*

PUZZLE gets down from the chair. We focus on MATTIE, with wagon, who is talking to GREG.

GREG: Look, is there some sort of crash course in writing poetry? I’d like to crack that bunch of Harp Guild Workshop Poetry ladies wide open.
MATTIE: You’re a man; the contest is open to women only.
GREG: I’m desperate enough for a sex-change operation.
MATTIE: You’re just jealous of your wife.
GREG: I’m even more ashamed of my sterility. I have no dreams. She is virile. I am not.
HILDA: Gregory La Selva couldn’t write a poem if he tried. He should stick to being a poem.
GREG: She’ll be sorry she said that. I’m going to do as you say and start remembering things from childhood, keep a diary, get a pen and an ink bottle.
MATTIE: A typewriter is okay.
GREG: I’m so dull, why hasn’t she left me ages ago? How do I get more introverted? Is there anything I could take?
NICHOLAS: Did you look at my scrapbook of intoxicating mushrooms?
GREG: Nicholas, it’s no use — showing me pictures of mushrooms. I want to see the mushrooms in person before I start collecting.
NICHOLAS: Opium.
GREG: Opium.
MATTIE: Awfully good at first — friend did a thesis on it about it. Your mind starts out being a palace; then… the palace turns into a boarding house, then a flophouse for tramps, then the tenements of criminals whose windows are striped with bars. The palace has turned into a prison.
GREG: I don’t care. Show me the palace, Nicholas, get me a dress.
NICHOLAS: What’s your size?
GREG: In a dress? (gives NICHOLAS a slip of paper)
MATTIE: For a start, Mr. La Selva, underline the words you really like in this forty-thousand-word dictionary. Nicholas, go to Agnes Dactyl’s place and see what she has in second-hand dresses. Let’s see these measurements. Very well.

She gives them to NICHOLAS, who slowly proceeds to AGNES’s store.

Oh boy, this is a new part of my thesis – the birth of a poet…

∞♥∞♥∞

*Note: “Being skinned by Apollo” is a reference to the fate of Marsyas, the satyr who challenges Apollo to a musical contest with the Muses as judges. In 1963 James Reaney wrote an adaptation of Euripides’ play The Bacchae (405 BCE), which was never produced. In Gyroscope, Gregory La Selva disguises himself as a woman to enter Hilda’s poetry contest, just as Pentheus goes dressed as a woman to spy on the Bacchae’s Dionysian rites. Gregory wins the poetry contest and avoids the gruesome fate of Pentheus at the hands of the Bacchae.

Gyroscope was produced in a workshop at Western University in early 1980, and performed in a rehearsed reading at Blue Mountain Poetry Festival that summer. Keith Turnbull later directed the play at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, May 14 to June 21, 1981. The cast members were Jerry Franken, Janis Nickleson, Rita Jiminez, Brian Dooley, and Nancy Palk.

James Reaney (holding mug of tea) with members of the Tarragon Theatre production of Gyroscope: Keith Turnbull, Dorothy Chamberlin, Nancy Palk, Suzanne Turnbull, and Janis Nickleson, May 1981. Photo courtesy Les Kohalmi.

Gyroscope is available in Reaney Days in the West Room: Plays of James Reaney (2009), edited by David Ferry and published by Playwrights Canada Press.

Berry-picking from James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark

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

Colours in the Dark is available from Talonbooks: https://talonbooks.com/books/colours-in-the-dark

For more about James Reaney’s use of shape poems or pattern poems as theatrical devices, see Thomas Gerry’s book The Emblems of James Reaney (2013) and Gerry’s article “Marvellous Playhouses The Emblems of James Reaney” in the Summer 2019 issue of Queen’s Quarterly.

“The Poet’s Typewriter” by James Reaney, 1997
James Reaney 1972