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
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 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.)
2026 — James Reaney’s centenary year — is off to a good start with two plays based on his work from London’s AlvegoRoot Theatre.
On February 20-21, AlvegoRoot presents two encore performances of Sleigh Without Bells: A Donnellys Story — a short story by James Reaney from The Box Social and Other Stories (1996). Adam Corrigan Holowitz reprises his solo performance as Ephraim, a young traveller lost in a blizzard who strays into Donnelly country. Directed by Kydra Ryan.
AlvegoRoot Theatre reprises James Reaney’s Sleigh Without Bells on February 20-21 in London, Ontario.
Where: The Manor Park Memorial Hall, 11 Briscoe Street W, London, Ontario When:February 20 at 7:30 pm and February 21 at2 pm.
Tickets: $30 at the door or call 519-615-2210 or order online from OnStageDirect.
AlvegoRoot’s second Reaney production this year is an adaptation of Take the Big Picture, James Reaney’s 1986 children’s novel. Take the Big Picture will be presented at Fanshawe Pioneer Village from June 10 to June 14.
Cast announcements are expected soonfor Take the Big Picture — an epic tale of six children, their parents, their grandmother, and a host of others. It appears that a sasquatch has followed the Delahay family all the way back to Antler River, Ontario after their year away in British Columbia – but quién sabe?
James Reaney’s children’s novel Take the Big Picture from 1986.
Poems Written About The Donnellys To Assist The Renewal of The Town Hall at Exeter, Highway #4 *
I Around Borrisokane, in Eire, the roads twist After cowherds with willow gads, after wise woman’s spells, After chariots and the widest go-around found in a mare’s skin. But in Biddulph, Canada, in Mount Carmel’s brooder stove, St Peter’s fields, The roads cross at right angles, a careful Euclidean net, roods, rods Spun by surveyors out of Spider stars – Mirzak, Spicula, Thuban, Antares. Like serpents, twitchgrass roots, dragons – the Irish roads twist, The old crooked roads twist in the cage of the straight new.
II We were horsemen, dressed well and from my brother’s entire horse, From his entire horse came the colt fast fleet hoofhand with which We seized and held onto the path through Exeter down to London. We lifted the hills, creeks, rivers, slaughterhouses, taverns, We lifted their travellers and those who were asleep when we passed And those who saw us rattle by as they plowed mud or whittled. We lifted them like a graveldust pennant, we swung them up and out Till they yelled about wheels falling off, unfair competition, yah! And we lie here now – headless, still, dead, waggonless, horseless, Sleighless, hitched, stalled.
III As the dressmaker hems my muslin handkerchiefs, The night the Vigilantes burnt down one of their own barns, As I sit waiting for a cake to bake and my gentle niece with me I realize I am not doing what you want me to do. You – bored with your Calvinist shoes chewed to pieces By streets of insurance, streets of cakemix, packages, soap, sermonettes. You want me to – you project a more exciting me on me. She should be burning! Clip! Ax! Giantess! Coarse, I should curse! Why should I accept these handcuffs from you?
James Reaney, 2005
* Respectively, the three speakers of these poems are William Porte, the Lucan postmaster, Tom Donnelly and Mrs. Donnelly.
“Entire Horse” is from Souwesto Home, a collection of James Reaney’s poems from 2005 available from Brick Books.
( ( 0 ) )Listen to Jeff Culbert read “Entire Horse” and other poems from Souwesto Homehere.
All three plays from James Reaney’s The Donnelly Trilogy — Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs — were performed at the Blyth Festival in 2023 at Blyth’s Outdoor Harvest Stage.
“Are there any more ladies and gentlemen for Calamity Corners as ’tis sometimes called, St. John’s, Birr — my old friend Ned here calls it Bobtown, the more elegant name is Birr. Elginfield known to some as Ryan’s Corners, Lucan that classic spot if it’s not all burnt down, Clandeboye, Mooretown, Exeter and Crediton. If Ned here hasn’t sawn it to pieces, the coach is waiting for you at the front door and it pleases you.”
(Opening lines from James Reaney’s The St. Nicholas Hotel)
Summer 2023 — On the way to the Outdoor Harvest Stage on the old Blyth Fairgrounds. Photo courtesy The Blyth Festival.
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)
James Reaney 