Village Squire, 1979-11, Page 7After' his famous first shdrt story experience he had another
short story on C.B.C. that Nathan Cohen wanted to dramatize. It
was the only thing of his the haughty Cohen ever liked, he says.
His second book of poetry A Suit of Nails was a long time in
coming he recalls and dealt with southwestern Ontario and that
farm he grew up on. It was an anatomy of agricultural life.
Next came an opera which was performed at Hart House
Theatre in 1959 along with a short play called One Man Mask, a
poetry reading put into a dramatic form. His first written play
was called The Sun and the Moon which was about Millbank
which was written for a contest and which he terms primitive. He
rewrote it however and it was produced later. It was about this
same time however that his first big hit play The Killdeer was in
rehearsal and brought him success including international
exposure. Although The Sun and The Moon was written for the
Festival there were no James Reaney plays presented at
Stratford until 1967 when John Hirsch scheduled Colours in the
Dark as a Centennial play. Hirsch had met Reaney when he was
a young student in Winnipeg while Reaney was teaching there.
He wanted to follow up the success of Colours in the Dark so he
commissioned the Donnelly plays but when Hirsch left the
Festival the project was dropped. The plays were handed back to
the author and he developed them in conjunction with Keith
Turnbull and Jerry Franken then at Tarragon Theatre. The group
later formed NDWT which has been the main producer of
Reaney plays in recent years.
The Donnelly Trilogy of plays started out to be a single play
originally, he says. He says it's a seven -headed dragon of a story
that is just too much to be dealt with in a single play. "Once you
start telling the story about the father killing the guy the
audience will want to know ali about that. You've sunk too much
. into that. Then comes the stage coach feud."
He says he and his research assistant tried to date in
chronological order all the events of the stage coach feud and the
list went from the ceiling to the floor. There were about five
things happening each day during the three year feud and it's a
very complex story.
"It's an epic story and I think that's why the ancient Greeks
wrote trilogies." he says. Huge stories seem to brcak down
easiest into three plays, he says. Eventually all three plays in his
Donnelly Trilogy. Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel and
Handcuffs were presented in one day. It took nine hours
including breaks to present the whole story.
"But I really thank the country I live in for giving me that
subject," he says. His first brush with the Donnelly legend came
when his stepfather told him the vigilante version of the story
when he was a young boy. He was really terrified, he recalls. He
didn't think about writing a play on the subject at that stage of
his life but when he was in college the subject surfaced again
when a woman presented a paper on the famous murder and was
attacked by a man with a shillelagh because she had said the
Donnellys cut the tongues out of horses and he had been a friend
of the Donnellys. It was the first time, Reaney realized that the
Donnellys had had their friends too. That got him thinking about
it.
"If 1'd been better trained and less shy I would have started
researching right then," he says now. "A lot of people were
alive then who knew the story but by the time I started
researching people would have to have been 96 before they'd
have been able to have seen William Donnelly when they were
nine."
During that research he says he didn't run into any of the
antagonism that Orlo Miller, another London writer who's dealt
extensively with the legend, has. The Trilogy won Reaney high
honours and acclaim. All of the plays won some sort of Chalmers
Award, the awards donated by the Chalmers Foundation and
given the best new Canadian plays of the season in Toronto
theatres. The middle play, The St. Nicholas Hotel won the prize
for the best plays of the season. It was also the greatest
embarrassment to Reaney, the Chalmers Awards Committee and
the Ontario Arts Council which administers the awards
ceremony. That was the year the playwright Rick Salutin was
4tikt
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November 1979, Village Squire 5