Village Squire, 1979-11, Page 10Beyond Words dealing with, of all things, psychological
experiments on rats. It will be quite scary he hopes.
That mime plays shows some of the versatility James Reaney
has shown in his work. In addition he's written a number of plays
for children including Apple Butter, Geography Match, Names
and Nicknames and Ignoramus. Names and Nicknames in
particular has had wide production in the U.S. He also wrote a
marionette play for the famous Caravan Theatre, the British
Columbia travelling theatre that moves from town to town in a
caravan of horse-drawn vehicles. Marionettes were another of
his early interests.
His interest in workshopping plays came in those days in the
sixties when he was working with the three young men later so
influential in Canadian theatre. Turnbull headed a summer
theatre which did seasons of Canadian plays in 1966 and 1967.
He wrote the play Listen To The Wind for that group about a boy
in a Perth County farmhouse who decided to spend the summer
putting on plays with the help of his cousins, neighbourhood
children and grown-up relatives. The working relationship with
the young group was so good that he kept working with them. He
held workshops every Saturday morning for anybody who
wanted to come and a lot of interesting things came out of them.
Since then he's done a lot of workshops all over the province,
even as far north as Timmins. Partly he says these are cultivative
sessions because if you can get poetry and his kind of theatre
across to people in groups then they might want to see it and be
able to understand it.
He's done a lot of work with community groups throughout the
province helping them to discover that they too can put on
theatre. It comes in part he says from his work as a teacher.
While many top-flight playwrights might distain working with
the students of a high school, even their alma mater, he enjoys it.
He was involved in a group of his students who were trying to put
on a play in Simcoe.
He's tried to encourage people in knowing that you don't have
to just write a script and stop there, that it can be produced by
gathering a group of people around you and putting it on. In his
position he receives a lot of scripts and reads them with the eye
that he may be able to pass on good new scripts to his friends at
NDWT. Generally he finds these playwrights are lonely people
who have no group of people around them. His advice generally
is to start working with children or younger people or older
people but to get a group of people around them that are part of
the community but not to just be alone. People are too often
atoms, living apart from everyone else, he says.
As a youngster he himself was very shy and found that
teaching, which forced him to come out of himself, was the way
of breaking out of his shyness. You can still see the shyness there
although once he's involved in a conversation he's happy to go
on for long periods. His appearance is deceiving. He looks like
the stereotyped absent minded professor, studious, probably
'boring, but in conversation he's lively with a delightful sense of
humour. His classes at the University are known for their
liveliness.
The energy of Canadian theatre has seemed to wind down in
recent years. Reaney attributes part of the problem to the lack of
good scripts available or at least the inability of theatres to
manage a flow of good scripts. Probably, he says, there are too
many theatres attempting to do Canadian scripts. It should
perhaps be boiled down to one theatre in Toronto doing new
scripts, perhaps a travelling theatre and some place like Blyth
Summer Festival in the summer. There's nothing wrong with the
theatres that just want to do classics.
Ironically although his roots are in Stratford and London, he
hasn't had a lot of professional production of his work there.
Colours In The Dark has been his lone professional play in
Stratford. His work was presented a good deal at the university
and through UWO's summer theatre in the late 1960's and early
'70's but he's never been presented on one of the professional
stages of the city.
He doesn't seem to be weeping about it much though. He
8 Village Squire, November 1979
continues to produce work at a prodigious rate. One thing just
seems to lead to the next. The national tour of the Donnellys led
to the idea for the book Fourteen Barrels from Sea to Sea, a
comic look at the tour. His list of books, plays and awards would
fill several pages. He is one of the few writers in Canada to have
been invested in the Order of Canada. His interests are so
varied, his ideas so profuse that it's impossible to capture much
of his personality in one short article.
Some of the man however will be there for the viewing when
King Whistle opens Nov. 15. With its imagery and symbolism.
Iia history and study of humanity the play encompasses many of
the things Reaney likes best. It will give people the chance to see
the playwright where he is often least performed, in his own
back yard.
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