The Play Box – James Reaney

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022

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.

January 5, 2009July 16, 2019

One Man Masque (1960)

James Reaney’s One Man Masque was first performed by the author as part of “An Evening with James Reaney and John Beckwith” at the Hart House Theatre in Toronto on April 5, 1960. Originally planned as the premiere of Beckwith and Reaney’s opera Night Blooming Cereus, One Man Masque and Beckwith’s Five Pieces for Brass Trio were added to form the first half of the program.

One Man Masque first performed by James Reaney on April 5, 1960. “A ONE-MAN MASQUE by James Reaney — Life and death in Canada (The poet does not promise eternity.)”

In his article “An Evening With Babble and Doodle: Presentations on Poetry” (Canadian Literature 12 Spring 1962, pages 37-43), James Reaney describes his ideas for presenting the poems as a masque:

Since the opera was to last only an hour John suggested that I read some poems to raise the curtain. I decided that something more than just a reading was called for, [… and] I ended up writing another libretto for a masque — masque in the sense of a series of tableaux and spectacles, or stage images. I had been working on a series of poems that presented a subject in various keys: you start out with a Dwarf, modulate to a poem about a Baby, proceed to one about a Dauphin (baby Prince) and eventually fly from it all with that baby among the birds — the humming-bird. This suggested a stage picture that started out with a cradle, proceeded through chair, table, bed, rocking-chair to coffin… [pages 41-42]

One Man Masque has been performed by Jerry Franken in 1974 at the Tarragon Theatre, Jeff Culbert at the Grand Theatre in 2002, and by Larry Beckwith at Nuit Blanche in 2010.

Jeff Culbert in One-Man Masque, Grand Theatre McManus Studio, London, Ontario, 2002

Jerry Franken in James Reaney’s One Man Masque, 1974 at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

January 4, 2009October 12, 2023

Night Blooming Cereus (1959)

“Night Blooming Cereus” image by designer Louis de Niverville and adapted by William Toye for the program for the first stage production (April 5 and 6, 1960 in Toronto).

Night Blooming Cereus, a chamber opera in one act, is one of several musical collaborations between poet and playwright James Reaney, who wrote the libretto, and composer John Beckwith. 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…” [Unheard Of, page 246]

Night Blooming Cereus calls for eight singers and an instrumental ensemble of fourteen players, and lasts about sixty minutes.[…] The image of a flower that blooms once a year — or by poetic licence once a century — stands for human hope and renewal…” [Unheard Of, page 247]

John Beckwith completed the music and orchestration in the summer of 1958, and CBC Radio commissioned a broadcast for the “Wednesday Night” program in April 1959 and again in 1960. The first stage production of Night Blooming Cereus was at the Hart House Theatre in Toronto on April 5, 1960 with the following cast:

ALICE: Anne Stephenson
FIRST GIRL: Shelia Piercey
SECOND GIRL: Ruth Ann Morse
MRS. BROWN: Patricia Rideout
MRS. WOOL: Irene Byatt
BEN: Alexander Gray
BARBARA: Patricia Snell
MR. ORCHARD: Bernard Johnson

Settings and costumes were by Louis de Niverville, musical direction by Ettore Mazzoleni and stage direction by Pamela Terry.

Program for Night Blooming Cereus designed by William Toye, 1960. SCENE: A street in a small town; later Mrs. Brown’s cottage. TIME: An evening in late March.

To listen to archived sound recordings of music by John Beckwith, see the complete catalogue holdings at the Canadian Music Centre.

Page from Reaney’s draft of the libretto for Night Blooming Cereus (see John Beckwith’s 1997 book, *Music Papers: Articles and Talks by a Canadian Composer*, page 219)

January 1, 2009July 16, 2019

Zamorna! And The House By the Churchyard

From Zamorna, April 17, 1999. Photo by Henry Xiong

Zamorna! And The House By the Churchyard, which was performed by students of the George Brown Theatre School in 1999, has been published for the first time in Reaney Days in the West Room: Plays of James Reaney, edited by David Ferry.

The play blends the real world of the Brontë family with a creation from their literary juvenilia, Branwell’s fantasy world of Zamorna. On April 17, 1999, James Reaney attended a performance of the play at George Brown College. Afterwards, he and David Ferry, the play’s director, participated in a discussion with members of the audience.

From Scene 4, 1831 Heatherbell:

BRANWELL Well, you see, girls… I’m a poet.

EMILY (with a book) There’s an old Welsh law, Branwell, that says—

GIRLS There are three things it is death to be:

CHARLOTTE death to be a king

ANNE fall in love with a fairy woman

EMILY death to be a poet

Sewing music swells up.

GIRLS Death… it is death to be a poet.