The Donnellys: A Trilogy. Blyth Festival Theatre. June 22-Sept. 3, 2023

The Black Donnellys ride
Their killers by their side
Down the Roman Line till the end of time
Stompin’ Tom Connors

When you head out of London on Highway 4 North, it is almost a straight line through to  Lucan, and easy to imagine the relative ease of the journey by stagecoach in the years before, first, the railway and then the automobile. The land is mostly flat, with farmland stretching for miles on each side of the road. In winter, there is always the risk of a snow squall, but in summer, the blue sky and the variegated green corn fields almost meet, with only the thinnest painterly line to divide them.

The half-hour drive to the Roman Line takes you to St. Patrick’s church and the cemetery where the Irish-Catholic Donnellys, who first came out of Tipperary in 1840 to settle in  Biddulph County in Upper Canada, are buried. Part history and part detective story, the brutal massacre of five members of the family by an armed vigilante mob of their neighbors on February 3, 1880, took place in what many contemporaries called “the most lawless county in the country”.

The legend lives on, not only in the Lucan Area Heritage and Donnelly Museum but also a  Donnelly café, where you can hear locals taking sides (the villains like life-size cardboard cutouts of long-gone but still familiar miscreants) while you grab a very up-to-the-minute latte, the new menu shaped by the creeping signs of gentrification in what was once a  sleepy town.

James Reaney saw his own foraging in documents to get to the “truth” behind the myth as a return to that part of South Western Ontario where he grew up on a farm just outside of  Stratford. Throughout an astonishingly diverse body of work that included poetry, theatre,  opera, and children’s plays and stories, he carved out his own literary territory (Souwesto)  as both real and literary space, like Faulkner’s legendary Yoknapatawpha county. The ambitious and celebrated trilogy that emerged from his Donnelly research firmly established the plays as rooted in a particular time and place, powerful regional drama. A  logical enough taxonomy in the early days of creating a fledgling home-grown Canadian literary tradition – but maybe one also long overdue for rethinking.

What if we got this earlier naming wrong, limiting the centrality of the Donnellys trilogy’s place in the deeper forging of the new Canadian union – burrowing deep into themes that are not merely local and regional, but at the very heart of the making of nation?

This would mean that Reaney’s Donnellys trilogy is not just a hugely accomplished landmark in Canadian theatre (think combining the two separate Naturalist and Symbolist strands of the famed Nationalist Irish Abbey Theatre in Dublin), but something much more remarkable. A three-part drama that performs the always at-risk dream of making a whole of quarreling parts. In one frozen moment of time, one grisly family murder was raised to the status of national history as a myth.

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The ambitious mounting of the Donnellys trilogy in its entirety at the Blyth Festival Theatre has to be seen as one of the major events of the 2023 theatre season. Under the talented and energetic direction of Gil Garratt, Blyth has maintained and grown its reputation as the little theatre that could. In almost every way that counts, the Blyth Festival Theatre in tiny Blyth  (pop. 1,065) resembles the 1939 children’s fable about the train that overcomes its size  through dogged optimism and hard work (“I think I can. I know I can.”) to stage an often original and daring Canadian repertoire that larger and considerably better funded Canadian theatres shy away from- and it does so with remarkably high-performance values.

The first play in the trilogy, Sticks and Stones (The plays opened gradually throughout the season which turned the summer months into an ongoing “event”) introduces us to all the characters as well as the spatial geographies that determine the plays’ antagonists. The title is both material and metaphorical, the name-calling, that, despite the moral of the children’s rhyme, can break your bones.

Central to Reaney’s position in the Donnellys’ debate is the continuance of the old country  Irish-Catholic feud between the Whitefeet and the Blackfeet, a reading at the heart of Orlo  Miller’s 1962 study The Donnellys Must Die. While the former stood for uncompromising violence in the bitter fight against their British colonial landlords, the latter was the name given to those, like the Donnellys, who refused to join the ranks of the vigilantes.

Reaney follows Miller (one of his earliest experiences in South London was going to hear the author’s lectures with his father at Middlesex College) in rejecting the myth of the  “Black Donnellys” as set out in Thomas P. Kelley’s 1954 study of the same name, which paints a lurid account of the Donnellys as a violent scourge on the community who deserved their ghoulish fate. Reaney gives Kelley his comeuppance by turning him into a  central character in the second play of the trilogy, St. Nicholas Hotel, in the role of a snake oil salesman and purveyor of the scurrilous Donnelly legend (James Dallas Smith is a  wonderfully dynamic showman George Stub).

Garratt’s aim in adapting the trilogy was to make it more accessible, but Sticks and Stones remains a crowded cast of characters ( Reaney’s notoriously detailed stage directions don’t help), even on the new 2021 open-air Harvest Theatre thrust stage with its multiple levels.  Then, there is the fact that all of the actors are doubled (at times, they are their main characters’ alter-egos, like masks from the Japanese Noh theatre which famously influenced Yeats). What emerges is exceptionally strong ensemble playing in which seasoned actors such as Geoffrey Armour, Paul Dunn, and Cameron Laurie, combine to produce a vivid sense of the robust family dynamic. Hallie Seline is a fine, subtle Jenny, while Masae Day plays the Donnelly cousin Bridget, ill-fated to have just arrived from Ireland.

Rachel Jones is a formidable presence throughout as the family matriarch Johannah who saves her husband James (the accomplished Randy Hughson) from hanging by taking an epic walk from Lucan to Goderich to deliver a petition. In the heightened object world of  Reaney’s trilogy, the road turns into a ladder which she climbs, stage- right, during other stage business. In the play, as surely as in life, the seven years in which her husband languishes in jail also become the period in which the characters of her six sons and one daughter are forged into steel.

The keenly choreographed St. Nicholas Hotel is the most successful play in the trilogy.  Full of comic antics and high-jinks, it casts the entrepreneurship of the period in a  competition for mastery of the London to Goderich stagecoach line in which the Donnelly brothers’ mettle is tested alongside their growing reputation for trouble in the community.  The social history of the period is staged in a carnivalesque register (this is the decade of  Ringling Bros. Circus in the United States, slowly creeping northward, but advertising and entertainment are widely twinned in the North American popular imagination). Just before his murder, Mike Donnelly (Mark Uhre in a muscular performance) plans a move to St.  Thomas to work on the railroad. The writing is on the wall: the heyday of the stagecoach is soon to be superseded by the new era of the iron horse and the buccaneering railway barons.

The final play, Handcuffs, begins with an address to the audience in which the convention of the Fourth Wall is exposed, along with the narrative drive to suspense (an incantatory chorus anticipates the harrowing end from the first play in the trilogy). Dallas Smith, as  menacing clown (think Jack Nicholson as The Joker) stares directly into the audience,  leering and baiting us : “You know what happens next”.

The central event of the Donnelly murder, to which the play has been hurtling headlong like a comet (the end is in the beginning) does not take place off stage (the ob-scene) as in  Greek tragedy. But the question of what to do with violence has always been at the heart of a tragic theatre.

Garratt follows Reaney’s notes for the staging of the bloody Donnelly slaughter in mime, a slow-motion apotheosis that makes time stand still until the stage is lit up (kudos to set and lighting director, Beth Kates) with a fire that threatens to engulf the whole theatre. The actors, in turn, move into the ghostly register of Victorian phantasmagoria.

Contested rights to land, pivotal to the doomed fate of the Donnellys, are a recurring theme in Canada’s settlement. The nation’s founding genocide and dispossession of its indigenous population was based on the Crown’s legal doctrine of terra nullius or the Doctrine of  Discovery. Biddulph county had already witnessed the forced eviction of a pioneering settlement of free Blacks (An invisible counter-history within the folds of the play, the ill-fated settlement emerged as its own story in the 2015 Blyth Festival production of Sean  Dixon’s The Wilberforce Hotel).

There is a small but telling scene early on in which surveyors discuss the inevitable squabbles to come as they mark out lots in the country. They cynically predict the new quarrels that will emerge in internecine battles between Irish Protestants and Catholics,  understanding implicitly that their colonial mappings of the land, tied to European  Euclidean geometries, are ill-suited to this new space of wilderness.

This is nation-building along fault lines that threaten to irrupt and turn violent even in events of community-building. Donnelly’s drunken act of manslaughter takes place at a  neighborly logging bee; the shivaree in which Will attempts to carry off his first choice of bride stages the rituals of misrule that periodically turn communal order upside down.

Like Johanna before him, James Donnelly insists “This is a new country we live in… no one  has to be afraid [here] of secret societies, secret people; we’re not in Ireland anymore.”  Something of their stubborn refusal to leave their land can only be explained by this unyielding belief in the promise of new world innocence. Unlike its neighbor to the South, Canada did not raise the territorial stakes to a doctrine of Manifest Destiny; nor did it undergo a bloody civil war between the states. Its chosen self-image, famously outlined by  Northrop Frye, was that of a peaceable kingdom, drawn from the biblical book of Isaiah.

It was a goal articulated most forcefully by one of the Fathers of Confederation (and surely its most spellbinding rhetorician), D’Arcy McGee. Not coincidentally, his own model was the embattled history of the Irish in North America (It is worth noting that the renunciation of armed struggle in Ireland was not agreed upon until The Good Friday Accord of 10  April 1998). After aligning himself with violent factions in his youth, McGee became a  passionate advocate of peaceful resolution in the New World. In 1862, three years prior to  conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec City, he gave a speech advocating “a new  Canadian nationality”…. We Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic, born and bred in a land of  religious controversy, should never forget that we live and act in a land of the fullest  religious and civil liberty.”

In Reaney’s trilogy, it is the eldest Donnelly son, Will, who most conspicuously embodies the challenge: how to make a whole out of the parts and turn former antagonists into neighbors and partners in the fraught business of nation-building. Will shares the potential for mischief of his family and is fearless in his entrepreneurial drive. But, he also has another side, first dramatized in an early establishing scene with his mother. Taunted and bullied by his peers as a “cripple”, he will receive two birthday gifts (in an otherwise strong performance, Steven McCarthy curiously displays almost no limp; it’s as though the  “hunchbacked king” Richard 111 were played without any bodily difference, though this  “otherness” is integral to his history).

The first is a black stallion he will name Byron (the heroic English Romantic poet shared his birthright of a clubfoot); the second is a fiddle: “It is for you- and only you,” his mother tells him. “To be your music for your entire lifetime.” Will’s response to the vengeful mob of 2 September 1879, only five months before the brutal massacre of his family, is not to answer violence with violence, but to play his fiddle and frighten the vigilantes away with music.

In his Introduction to the Champlain Society Documents published in 2004, Reaney argues that not enough has been made of this well-documented incident. “From now on”, he  declared, after discovering it, “I have nothing but admiration and sympathy for the  Donnelly family and a feeling that early accounts of the family betrayed them.” The lynchpin to reading the Donnellys in the Blyth Festival Theatre production, then, is to be their eldest surviving son, Will.

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It is late at night and director Gil Garratt has been burning the midnight oil at both ends to finish his adaptation. The final play in the trilogy, Handcuffs, is getting near the finish line,  but there are still loose ends. Will seems more important than ever, but Garratt needs to find “something to put in his mouth” that will more clearly establish his meaning in the play. He looks for a poem in Byron, but comes up empty.

Finally, he happens upon a section of Tennyson’s 1850 In Memoriam that captures what  Reaney felt had been overlooked in the Donnelly history. In performance, Will rhetorically declaims the whole of the famous section “Ring out, Wild Bells” from the Victorian poet laureate’s poem. Remarkably, the penultimate stanza contains in nuce the biblical ideal of the peaceable kingdom. Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.  

Garratt has stumbled on –found- the very words that align Will Donnelly with the mythos of Canada as the thousand-year-old peaceable kingdom. It is an elegiac closure to the  Donnelly trilogy in the Blyth production, but not one without a central irony at its core.  Will proclaims a national regime of peace, but his family was felled in one of the most brutal murders in the settling of the new nation. D’Arcy McGee, in turn, is assassinated by a Fenian extremist as he enters his boarding house in Ottawa after a late-night session of parliament, less than a year after calling for the renunciation of the bitter divisions of the old world.

This is less nation as a peaceable kingdom than a fitful ideal that demands permanent vigilance. It is a strong dream, but one always shadowed by both a foundational genocide and events like that fatal shot ringing out of Mrs. Trotter’s Boarding House. D’Arcy  McGee’s funeral procession on April 13, 1868, was one of the largest in Canadian history,  with almost the whole population of Montreal turning out. Twelve years later, on February 4, 1880, the Donnellys of Lucan Biddulph, met their own fate.

Cottagers and Indians   by Drew Hayden Taylor

Reviewed  by  Barbara Gabriel, 

 

                       Photo Terry Manzo.  James Dallas Smith as Arthur Copper, the aboriginal neighbour.

A lazy afternoon on a cedar deck that could be anywhere in Ontario cottage country. A casually dressed, mature woman from Toronto (her relaxed cotton shirt and pants might have been purchased from the Eaton’s catalogue in bygone days) reaches for her glass of Chardonnay and settles in. She surveys the lake beyond and with it the promise of decades of family tradition, stretching far into the future. No matter what happens, they will always have this place of refuge, with its titled ownership, the deed safely tucked away in a drawer.

Her (imagined) musings are interrupted by the figure already introduced to the audience- a man in a canoe downstage who has a long familiarity with the scent of the breeze, the plant life, the water. And now he can even smell her barbequed chicken and he wants some. Interrupting both her silence and her plans, he will turn out to be not just her real-life Aboriginal neighbour, who shares residency on this lake, but history’s ghost, in a haunting in which the storied white man’s burden, comically becomes what the play calls “cottager’s burden”.

For Drew  Hayden Taylor, one of Canada’s outstanding Native writers who is a playwright, essayist, short-story writer, and, in all of these genres, a keen humourist, the comedy of the Aboriginal tragedy in Canada is never beside the point. Though the Blyth Festival’s outdoor staging of his two-actor play Cottagers and Indians (first commissioned and produced by Tarragon Theatre in 2018 ) confirms his signature tone, the production took place, this time round, against an historic backdrop – the visit of Pope Frances to Canada to deliver a long-awaited apology to First Nations people. “After much anticipation”, the playwright-humourist tweeted, on the opening week of his play’s Blyth performance, “the Pope has finally acknowledged the genocide that happened to Indigenous people. I am looking around. I don’t think much has changed. I’ll look again in an hour”.

The Pope’s circumscribed apology reopened old wounds for trauma survivors and left much unfinished business (as Hayden Taylor suggests, these include the refusal to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery as well as critical issues of reparation and the role the Catholic Church played in the sexual abuse and deaths of children at residential schools.) The attempt to wipe out all trace of indigenous language and culture easily meets the UN threshold for cultural genocide, and with the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves earlier in 2022, the crimes, always known to the Aboriginal community, were palpable in a national nightmare. As the playwright, himself, might have said about the accidental twinning of the papal visit and the Blyth production, “you can’t make it up”.

Director Deneh’Cho Thompson, is a Dene director, actor and playwright deeply involved in developing Indigenous acting pedagogy and Indigenous dramaturgies. As a written play text, the exchanges in Cottagers and Indians sometimes lean towards staged debate. It is to the credit of both the actors, and their director, that a genuinely dramatic relationship emerges between the two characters, in reciprocal tellings of dispossession which, though mutually felt, are clearly not equally weighted either as individual or collective traumatic histories.

Kelly McIntosh is suitably feisty as the beleaguered Toronto cottager, Maureen Poole, who has slowly lost the full use of the water at the edge of her beloved cottage, alongside losing the husband who dreamed this place of calm retreat with her. But it is James Dallas Smith as Arthur Copper who rescues the play from its tendency to sometimes undramatic colloquy. He is a wonderfully kinetic actor whose irony and gestural language of the comic mime (here in the service of deeply felt injustice and mission) animates the stage.

The set design by Beth Kates and Anishinaabe artist Moses Lunham is integral to the play’s story-telling. It wraps the outdoor stage with graphically strong depictions of Aboriginal figures and iconography to extend the space visually. And in the background looms what might well be seen as the central figure of the play, both material and symbolic, the wild rice or manoomin (Ojibway) which is at the very heart of their struggle.

No one who has seen the play will ever run their fingers through wild rice (or eat it) again, without a deepened sense of its place in Indigenous history and culture. But, what was the backdrop to this compelling manoomin story in Cottagers and Indians that continued in the courts long past Hayden Taylor’s writing of the play?

Starting in 2007, residents of Pigeon Lake in the Kawarthas were becoming increasingly concerned with the amount of wild rice growing in their lake, tangling up boats and hampering their activities in the water. It finally came to a head when they confronted one James Whetung roaring by on an airboat with a scoop on the front, visibly seeding the lake. It turned out that Whetung, a member of Curve Lake First Nation Ojibway community, that is part of the Anishinaabe Nation, had made it his mission to grow and expand the tall grass which had for thousands of years provided food security and been deeply embedded in indigenous ritual.

This story of Cottagers and Indians (itself a play on the childhood game of Cowboys and Indians, replicating racist Western film tropes) becomes, then, a potent symbol of a much larger ongoing struggle. The two characters hurl accusations at each other that repeat their ongoing battle in an historical past which is also fully present. While Kelly proclaims genteely that “in principle we support Native issues”, Arthur is having none of it. “Bring it on, white lady”, he taunts her. In the end, it is a stand-off, an “Oka on water”

After writing the play, Hayden Taylor produced a documentary on the Pigeon Lake controversy and he continued to talk about it in interviews. It is fitting, though, that the most memorable vehicle for the event would be a comic play in a storytelling mode, with dialogue as well as voice-over soliloques. Despite considerable cultural and linguistic variation among Canada’s Indigenous peoples (read Haydon Taylor’s wonderful edited collection of essays in Me Funny for a half dozen versions of why the chicken crossed the road in Cree, Anishinaabe, Dene, and more), humour is a common denominator which is an indispensable feature of Indigenous writing, performance, art, and daily life.

There are stories and anecdotes in Me Funny that are laugh-out-loud funny, even where they riff on imposed stereotypes, and the deeply-felt dispossession of land and water at the heart of Aboriginal history and legal claims. One essay in the collection by Karen Froman, a member of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, closes with an anecdote that provides a comic gloss on the more profound issues at stake in Cottagers and Indians.

When NASA was preparing for the Apollo Project, it trained on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. An esteemed Navajo elder who came to understand the nature of the mission asked if he might send along a tape recorded message in his own language. NASA, sensing useful publicity, agreed and then proceeded to have the message translated. One Navajo group after another refused, laughing out loud, instead, when they heard the words of wisdom of their elder to the moon. Even the official government translator laughed when he heard it . But, in the end, unlike the others, he was duty bound to translate the elder’s message from the Navajo to the moon in the plainest of terms: ‘Watch out for these assholes- they have come to steal your land.”

Blyth Festival Theatre ,  July 21-August 11

The opening play of the  Blyth Theatre Season, Michael Healey’s Canadian classic, The Drawer Boy, has once more come home.

Photo by  Terry Manzo. l.to r.  Jonathan Goad, Randy Hughson  and Cameron Laurie.

Set in a farming community in Huron County, its starting point is the legendary The Farm Show directed by Paul Thompson, the most celebrated of a number of collectively created documentary plays in Canada in the 1970’s, which echoed decentralizing and regional impulses in theatre internationally. Yet, this pioneering work took place in Canada under particularly urgent national conditions, where most of the major theatres (and their enviable subsidies) were still shackled to colonial traditions.

The Drawer Boy is now being staged, thanks to Pandemic caution, in a newly built outdoor theatre, surrounded by farmland. The open wooden structure, with its thrust stage, invites a minimalist set, though the cleverly worked farm house interior (designed by Steve Lucas) is, by turns, transparent and opaque, like the unfolding story itself. The larger setting of the play now becomes the billowing green corn fields that surround the stage, while as the evening closes in, the clear blue sky turns, first, inky violet, and then pitch black. In the end, this shift mirrors the tonal progression of the play, which becomes darker and more inscrutable as events unfold.

Though it begins with easy laughter, rooted in the well-worn trope of city slicker meets country bumpkin, the play slides into a crisis of truth, a rural Rashomon which cuts to the quick of either simple or settled story-telling. Under Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt’s nuanced direction, The Drawer Boy returns to what it has always been, an actor’s play (Garratt played the role of Miles in the very first production), with the two bachelor farmers being given a wide berth for, first comic, then, tragic turns. The structure of repetition, which is motivated by Angus’s memory lapses, mimics the cruel mnemonics of Trauma in which a deeper layer of the mind has forgotten nothing.

The buried truth of these farmers’ lives is painfully cracked open like a walnut when Miles, an actor from Toronto, comes through their door. It is the first of many historical gestures in the play, in which the actor, played by Cameron Laurie with compelling innocence and enthusiasm, offers to help with farm chores in order to learn first-hand about the work and lives of these farmers. It is a retelling of one of the inaugural events of Canadian theatre. On the face of it, the play re-enacts the work of Thompson’s collective creation in which a troupe of actors from Theatre Passe Muraille knocked on farm doors near Clinton, Ontario (the date of 1972, follows close on the publication of Alice Munro’s 1971 breakthrough fiction about the Ontario Gothic of Huron County) to work on farms and bring back the raw material which would make up the set stories and monologues of ordinary Canadians. The difference is that Healey’s play, with its kernel of traumatic experience, unspools to remind us that there is no such thing as ordinary, while truth, itself, is on shifting ground.

Much of the humour of the play comes at the expense of the ingenious Toronto actor, who is fed tall tales about crop rotation and the protocols of chickens laying eggs. Notebook in hand, he falls for them all, and adds a few new comic moments which send up his theatrical training. Not content to document the work and lives of the farmers, he applies his Method acting training to experience the inner emotions of Daisy the cow.

Soon enough, though, Miles hones in on the central mystery of the farmers and uncovers the origin of Angus’s damaged memory. What he takes from Morgan’s telling is the first archaeological layer of story in The Drawer Boy. He tells the young actor-dramaturge how the two childhood friends, the one a farmer, the other,  the drawer (a moniker based on his penchant for drawing plans), enlisted and went off to Europe to fight in the war. There, they met two English women, Sally and Frances, but in one life-altering fatal decision, Morgan sends his friend off into the streets for brandy for the foursome. It is the moment of the Blitz, when the bombs are raining on London, and Angus is severely injured by falling shrapnel. He survives surgery and metal plates, but it is the beginning of a lifetime of severe headaches and memory lapses. Ill- luck follows them to Canada where the two tall English girls whom they have married in a double wedding , suffer a fatal car accident. When Morgan tells Miles that they are buried high up on a nearby hill, the young actor can no longer be a passive recipient of story. He insists that Angus be told the truth.

Yet, when the two farmers see their history on stage in rehearsal, they respond in diametrically opposite ways. While Angus recognizes his history for the first time, Morgan forbids the young actor to use their story. In the end, he is forced to confess it is a lie, no more than a protective fable that shields both Angus and himself from a more troubling story of love and loss. Whereas the first version of what happened promised a redemptive reading of art and theatre, this new darker truth unmoors them completely.

Randy Hughson’s Angus is pitch-perfect throughout. His discovery of the reality of what happened, is less a cry than a howl of anguish, an animal response that cuts through the frozen blocks of his memory to release truth, but also pain. It is a wonderfully layered performance. As his inseparable friend and keeper, Jonathan Goad delivers a strong and utterly convincing Morgan, cynical observer of the wet-behind-the ears Torontonian in the play’s earlier moments, but racked with guilt as he is compelled to tell the truth of the past. There is a moral, after all, in the duty of care that one friend provides for the other, even if it is born of guilt, and a debt that can never be repaid.

Talked together and then in threes, one tall and one taller. The tall one was liked by the drawer, the tall one, the farmer.

Successive stagings of The Drawer Boy have given it new life (Nina Lee Aquino’s 2018 production post-colonial casting of an Indigenous and Black actor as the two farmers made exemplary sense). Garratt sets up his own production with a half-hour musical prelude (the accomplished Sound designer is Lyon Smith) which proves to be anything but incidental to the performance. The musicians are the talented Anne Lederman and Graham Hargrove and the multiple instruments that they play do more than establish a mood and rural context. Their performance also returns us to what may be the most compelling feature of Healey’s play- its central use of sound to deliver character and event.

The Drawer Boy’s re-enactment of The Farm Show’s origins has traditionally cast it in relation to what is generically a creation story — and this framing has stuck to it like a burr on a pig’s tail, as they might say down on the farm in Huron County. But, it is another Canadian theatrical tradition (and its seminal playwright) which may offer an equally important framework for talking about Healey’s play. “ Listen”, James Reaney counselled in his Listeners’ workshop in the loft of an old Legion hall in London 1968, and his injunction anticipates his experiments with sound throughout his plays from this point onward.

In his epochal trilogy, The Donnellys, his children’s plays, his collaborative writing of opera, and throughout his remarkably multi-disciplinary work, Reaney emphasized the acoustic surround of his plays. He revelled in whistles, word-lists, music, and incidental sound. (His concept of the sonic environment echoes Canadian composer R. Murray Shafer’s influential notion of the acoustic environment.) The sonic landscape of Reaney’s work delivers Canadian history not through documentary mimetic tradition, but as poetry, rooted in a powerful aural landscape which tells its story though sound.

Healey’s play returns us to oral traditions: the fable, tall tale, and ballad (“two tall girls, one tall and one taller”, echoes through successive characters and situations, until the phrase becomes incantatory and part of the music of the play). When his farmers tell of the stories and events that haunt them , they speak in a language of repetition and reversal, their idiom that of jagged sound made by whatever home-grown instrument is at hand. Instead of word-lists, Angus is preoccupied with the roll-call of numbers rattling through his brain (and it is a number, recalled to memory, that turns out to deliver a signal moment in the play, the truth of what really happened). It is plain speech but it is also plain speech as poetry and it creates heightened registers of language at key moments in the play.

Could it be that Gil Garratt was conscious all along of this alternative poetic Canadian line of inheritance to Healey’s The Drawer Boy, even as he pays homage to its documentary The Farm Show genesis in his program notes? He has clearly given his first-rate cast of actors free rein to explore the rhythmic inner sound of the play, even as he sets it up with a musical prelude, drawn from the idiom of country life, in ways that conspire to make a whole of the parts. There is no hint of another way of telling history in the director’s comments in the play program- unless, that is, he is winking at us, telling us something on the sly. Garratt has put a teasing photo of himself at the very back of The Drawer Boy program, looking quite comfortable lying down in a cemetery, face up, fine hat, with his hands crossed over his chest. His head rests casually  on the tombstone directly behind him, the largest and most immediate, in a visually receding field of monuments.   At the top it reads unmistakeably in  bold–faced letters, DONNELLY.

Tickets can be ordered on line at www.blyth/festival.com or call  1-877-862-5984.