Village Squire, 1979-11, Page 6force behind the creation of the Stratford Festival. Shakespeare
and Stratford went back further though. Mr. Reaney recalls with
the old Stratford Normal School, the school for public school
teachers that is now occupied by Conestoga College and
interestingly enough is right next door to the Festival Theatre,
presenting Shakespearean plays every year until about 1937.
Although he is now about equally well known as a playwright
and a poet it was theatre that grabbed the attention of the young
James Reaney first. His mother Elizabeth helped that interest.
As a teacher she was interested in having her students put on
plays and this she did at the various schools she taught in around
the Stratford area. In fact, her son speculates, she may not have
had her contract renewed at one school because parents and
trustees felt she was spending too much time putting on plays.
His father too passed on some of his interest in theatre. He
was interested in acting and pantomime also in country schools.
There was a lot of activity that went on at the amateur level that
has never been recorded, Reaney says.
With this background in theatre he set out to write his first
play at age 17. He'd been creating little theatre pieces with
friends and at school for Hallowe'en before then but had never
really called it making plays until then.
Drama however took a back seat when he went on to the
University of Toronto on a scholarship. There was no
encouragement to write plays there, he says. He did show one
verse play he had written to Robert Gill of Hart House but at the
time there was very little if any original theatre being done at
Hart House. It was a time when the labour pains of the new
Canadian theatre were first being felt elsewhere in Toronto. The
New Play Society under the leadership of Dora Mayor Moore was
presenting the first new Canadian plays to be produced in years.
It was this group when one script failed to arrive on time that
invented Spring Thaw as a stop gap, a stop gap that proved
popular for the next 20 years. Radio drama was the main outlet
for aspiring writers.
"There was no one to tell you what to do," he recalls. "The
creative writing I took was all stories or poems."
Still there were contacts made at the university that have
played important parts in his writing career since then. One was
John Beckman who since has worked with him on two operas.
And it was U of T Alumni group, a group of women who were
doing avant garde theatre in classes and eventually producing
plays that eventually presented his work and gave him his first
big break as a playwright in 1958.
He stayed at U of T while he studied first for his Bachelor's
degree and later for his Masters. During the stint he had his first
short story published, The Box Social and it caused a furor and
caused him to lose his chance to become literary editor. Some of
his friends hated the story and told him it shouldn't have been
published. He should have had a manager, he recalls now
because with the nation-wide publicity the story received he
could have published a book called The Box Social and other
stories. But he didn't and he laughs, he lost his chance to Marie
Claire Blais of Ontario, the young genious of writing. It was just
as well, though he says, because by now he'd have been
exhausted.
He did publish a book of poetry just after leaving college. He
then accepted a post teaching creative writing at the University
of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Getting outside of Ontario was what
he needed to be able to put his background in prespective, he
says. His writing became fixated on Stratford, the farm and
childhood for a long time. It wasn't until about 15 years ago, he
• says that he began to see that you could make stories out of the
people, the legends and the history of the region he grew up in.
The breakthrough came with his plays about the Donnellys. Until
he did the research for those plays, he says, he had no concept of
how farm life worked. Now with the research for King Whistle
he's come to a greater understanding of town and city life.
"Stratford always used to be an absolute inigma to me," he
says. There were no role models for the kind of theatre he's
trying to do until lately he says. Now theatres such as Theatre
Passe Muraille are exploring the same kind of area.
4 Village Squire, November 1979
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