[On 3 December, I published an article by frequent ROT contributor Kirk Woodward, “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” about the great Irish playwright as assessed by Eric Bentley, the prolific American theater writer and translator. I thought that a fitting companion piece would be my report on the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada. I wrote this report on 21-26 August 2006; it originally included mini-reports on each of the plays I attended, but I’ve already excerpted the discussion of Noel Coward’s Design for Living (29 March 2012) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (24 November 2012), so I decided to omit all but the two Shaw plays I saw at Niagara-on-the-Lake—both of which got a mention in Kirk’s article. I have, however, left all the coverage of the festival surroundings and what we did to pass the time between the shows—and my general comments on the festival as a whole.]
In
the summer of 2006, I spent a week with my mother in Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario, Canada, for the Shaw Festival. The Round House Theatre of
Bethesda/Silver Spring, Maryland, to which my mother subscribed, sponsored
the trip bi-annually (in alternate years, they went to the Stratford Shakespeare
Festival), and they made all the arrangements from Baltimore-Washington
International Thurgood Marshall Airport to
NOTL and back (we were on our own to get to BWI and then back on the return
leg), except lunches and dinners for most of the week. (There was one
lunch, on the road from Buffalo airport to Niagara-on-the-Lake; one dinner; and
one cocktail party on the Round House—it was really our money, of course—and
breakfasts were included in the accommodations of the Pillar and Post Inn, our
NOTL hotel.) The Round House reserved six shows, but several afternoons
and most mornings were free if anyone wanted to add performances; we selected
two additional shows to make a total of eight performances out of the season’s
offering of ten plays. (Mother decided that she didn’t want to go to two
shows every day—though I probably would have done so on my own—and she
eliminated one she didn’t want to see. She left the rest of the selection
to me.)
The
trip ran from Monday, 7 August, to Monday, 14 August, but the plane from
BWI was at 9:20 a.m. and Baltimore is a 45-minute drive from D.C., so when Mother
saw an ad for an airport Ramada that offered a low rate for the night, plus
free parking while we were away and a ride to and from the airport, we decided
to drive over Sunday evening to avoid getting up at oh-dark-thirty (to arrive
an hour before take-off), parking in an airport lot, and taking a
shuttle between the parking lot and the terminal, or getting a limo early
in the morning and then one back—which would have cost as much as or more than
the motel. (It paid off, too, because, as we found out Monday
morning when we gathered at the gate with the rest of the group, there had been
an accident on the road between D.C. and BWI and traffic had been backed up for
about an hour.) Anyway, because of this and the schedule of the bus I
used from New York, I had to ride down on Friday, 4 August, so I had
Saturday in D.C. with my mom and we took in a couple of art shows that Mother
had saved till I came down.
So,
on to Canada and Shaw.
The
Round House trip, as I said, left from BWI and flew to Buffalo. A bus met
us at Buffalo Niagara
International Airport and we rode about an hour to NOTL. (Because
the hotel wasn’t going to be ready for us until after noon or so, we made a
prearranged lunch stop at a restaurant in Amherst, New York, outside of Buffalo.
It was attached to a motel, but the meal, a buffet, was surprisingly
good.) The drive went through Niagara Falls, New York, and we had a view
of the falls as we passed through (we could see the Canadian falls as we passed
by, too). The drive through town, along the Niagara River to the
Lewiston-Queenstown crossing—where we crossed the border (and the river) rather
than over the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara because the wait is shorter and the
customs procedures are usually less arduous—revealed how tacky the town had
become recently, especially with the addition of a huge casino built by the
Seneca Indians in 2002 (the attached hotel opened in January ’06). I
spent a day in Niagara when I was teaching at the State University of New York
at Oneonta in 1989 and it was pretty honky-tonk then, but it had ballooned in
the intervening 17 years.
NOTL,
on the other hand, was pretty nice—more Cape Coddy. There are obviously
ordinances that keep certain development outside of the town’s tourist and
historic center. (In fact, we never saw a gas station, grocery market,
fast-food restaurant, or drug store anywhere near the center of town. The
locals obviously get their staples—there wasn’t a Staples, either—somewhere
outside of town—some mall somewhere, I suppose.) The main drag, Queen
Street, was lined with boutiques, restaurants, and about four different ice
cream parlors (a very popular commodity in NOTL, it seems—everybody walked
around eating ice cream). Two of the festival’s theaters were also here
(the other was a little ways in the other direction). There were also a
dozen or more art galleries in and around town—but Canadian artists may be the
least interesting I’ve ever encountered. We noticed this in both
Vancouver and Quebec as well. (I’d be surprised if anyone can name
one world-renowned Canadian artist.) The commercial part of town is only
along Queen, so the blocks on either side are residential and many of the
houses are 19th-century. Many of them, both old and new, have been
converted into bed and breakfasts—most of which had no vacancies when we walked
around that week, suggesting they do a good business, at least at this time of
year. The town center is obviously devoted to the tourist trade, but it wasn’t
cheesy like a Jersey shore boardwalk. The weather while we were there was
glorious and the town was full of people from all over the world—we could tell
from the languages and accents—shopping, strolling, sitting on the benches that
line both sides of Queen Street, eating at the many restaurants. (The
food in NOTL—perhaps a Canadian tendency, or an Ontario one—while not
unpalatable, tended to be bland and flavorless. Our one tasty dinner was
a pasta meal we had at a restaurant with a few Italian-oriented dishes on its
menu. Maybe there’s an ordinance against spices, too.)
Niagara-on-the-Lake
is located on a point of land formed where the Niagara River meets Lake
Ontario. The town has water on two sides, and I gather that this is part
of what contributes to its climate that makes the land good for growing
wine grapes and peaches. (The place is alive with flowers everywhere,
too!) Those are the two major industries of NOTL, and it must be
profitable because there are some really big houses in and around the
town. (It’s also a vacation spot, aside from the Shaw
Festival. I also wonder if it isn’t a retirement town or second-home
community for wealthy Ontarians, too.) There are dozens of vineyards and
orchards in the area—we ate at one of the winery restaurants for the
Round House “farewell dinner” our last evening there. We had some of the
wine, of course, and it’s pleasant enough for the most part—good vin ordinaire. And
as it happened, the weekend we were there, on Saturday and Sunday, was the
Peach Festival. (We had some cold peach soup before the matinee on
Saturday afternoon. Very nice.)
The
town was settled in the 1780s by loyalists fleeing the American Revolution and became
the first capital of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1792. It was a haven
and remained a British outpost into the 19th century, with a British Army
division stationed at Fort George (completed in 1802). NOTL was also the
site of the Battle of Fort George during the War of 1812. (After a fierce
fight in May 1813, Americans occupied Niagara-on-the-Lake for seven months and
then burned it when they left—which is why there are so few 18th-century
structures in the town.) Mother and I walked around the town in two
stages—one afternoon we covered the town itself, then another we strolled along
the lake shore—and there were plenty of houses all over that date from the
whole span of the 19th century. From the look of both the old and new properties,
it’s clear that NOTL must mandate a strict level of up-keep of both the
buildings and the grounds—not one property we saw, neither private homes
nor city parks, was run-down, unkempt, neglected, or overgrown. Part of
this is certainly just because it’s Canada, which has a reputation for
being well-behaved. There was no litter anywhere in NOTL, and even when
we jay-walked, the cars stopped to let us cross the streets. (We noticed
this in Vancouver also—though I don’t recall if it was common in Quebec,
too.) The town didn’t have a single stop light, either—just stop
signs. (The main intersection had the only traffic signal I noticed—a
single flashing red beacon, the same as a stop sign.) It’s nice for
vacation, but living there must seem like living in Stepford!
The
festival was started in 1962 by Brian Doherty, a local lawyer and theater
enthusiast, as a “Salute to Shaw.” Its first productions, performed by
local amateurs, were in a disused courthouse built in the 1840s (now the black
box Court House Theatre, one of the festival’s three performance venues).
It quickly attracted both critical and financial attention and became a
companion to the Stratford Festival, 2½ hours west, which was launched (with
more professional intentions) in 1953. (There is, in fact, a third
theater festival in Canada, the Charlottetown Festival on Prince Edward Island,
devoted to “new Canadian musicals.” I didn’t know there were Canadian musicals,
much less new ones! More on this—the Canadian musical, I mean; not the
Charlottetown Festival—later.) The Shaw is considered one of the two
largest repertory companies in North America—the other being, obviously, the
Stratford Festival.
The
Shaw runs from April through October and November—some shows opening later and
others closing earlier. (I understood from the locals we chatted with
that the weather in NOTL is awful in the late fall and winter—cold, rainy,
windy, and gray. Except for Christmas, when there’s another influx of
tourists, it’s pretty bleak in the off-season.) Like most traditional
theaters, the festival is dark on Mondays (which was clearly why the Round
House trip arrived and left on that day), but during the performance week there
are at least two shows a day at all three theaters, and often—I’m not sure it’s
not also every performance day—an 11:30 a.m. “lunchtime” performance.
That comes to 36-54 performances a week (I did the math); you can figure out
how many shows a season that makes. (There are also script readings,
poetry and song presentations, discussions, chats, workshops, lectures, and
demonstrations going on many days as well. These folks keep busy.)
The festival is a true seasonal rep: no play is performed twice in a row, which
means some theaters change productions three times a day. Most actors are
in two plays (a few are in only one; no one I could spot was in more than two),
and there’s no apparent attempt to consider which theater houses which show
when it comes to casting. The theaters are strung out along Queen Street
in NOTL: the little Court House and the Royal George are only a couple of
blocks apart in “downtown”; the Festival Theatre is a few blocks east on Queen’s
Parade, an extension of the main drag. (Nothing in Niagara-on-the-Lake is
all that far away from anything else. On afternoons when we didn’t see a
matinee, Mother and I walked around most of the town and its immediate
environs. We had terrific weather for it, too.)
The
company comprises some 60 actors (directors and designers, as well as
other artists such as composers, are hired individually for each
show), but all don’t appear every season; about 30 or so work each year, and they
are on contract for the season. Many actors live in NOTL now and consider
the Shaw their permanent artistic base, doing other work like films and TV (all
those U.S. TV programs that are taped in Toronto and Vancouver are in many of
the company’s credits) as well as other stage work from time to time, but
returning to the Shaw regularly. Some of the actors in 2006 were in their
fourth or fifth season in NOTL, but others were into double digits. (The
other artists also come back year after year, but they aren’t part of the
permanent company.) Loyalty from both sides—the artistic director at the
time, Jackie Maxwell (currently in her 14th season), still worked with artists
who started at the Shaw before her arrival—is clearly an attribute of this
community. The actors who live in NOTL have bought homes and are raising
families there.
The
Shaw Festival mandate, as they call it, is to showcase the plays of GBS and his
contemporaries. (I don’t know if the idea when the festival was
originally conceived was to restrict itself to Shaw’s plays only, but the
inclusion of plays “written in Shaw’s lifetime” has been part of the concept
for decades, in any case.) Considering that GBS lived almost a
century (1856-1950; the festival celebrated his sesquicentennial earlier in
2006), the definition of “contemporary” leaves a lot of leeway—and covers
a lot of territory stylistically! In 2000, the festival expanded its
mandate to include plays written about
the period of GBS’s lifetime, so now they do modern plays set in that
almost-century. The ’06 season included two Shaws (Arms and The Man and Too True To Be Good)—which I gather is the
practice—plus an Ibsen (Rosmersholm)
and a pair of Chekhov one-acts (The
Bear and The
Proposal, under the umbrella title Love Among the Russians). Coming, I
suppose, in the category of plays by Shaw contemporaries (though at the
end of his century) are Design for
Living (1932) by Noël Coward (1899-1973) and The Crucible (1953) by
Arthur Miller (1915-2005). (I’m guessing that Crucible was “in” because of Miller’s life
dates since it isn’t “about” Shaw’s lifetime: it’s set in 1692 and was
written three years after Shaw died; even McCarthyism, its subtext, really
started after GBS’s death. It’s kind of a stretch, I guess—a policy
evidently known as “Jackie’s elastic mandate.”) Two adaptations from
novels could go either way—the source material is contemporary to GBS and the
setting is, consequently, of that period, too, though the adaptations are much
later. Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The
Heiress was adapted from Henry James’s 1881 Washington Square in 1947
(which would barely qualify as “Shaw’s lifetime”), and the story is set in
1850. The première of the festival-commissioned stage adaptation of H. G.
Wells’s 1897 The Invisible
Man qualifies because the 2006 play is set within Shaw’s
life. Another new play, Lillian Groag’s 1997 The Magic Fire, is set in
the immediate post-World War II years in Argentina, barely fitting into GBS’s
life span. The final entry of the 2006 bill, Cole Porter’s High Society, is the 1997 stage
adaptation of the 1956 film musicalization of Philip Barry’s 1939 Philadelphia Story.
Once more, the source material fits into the Shaw life span, but the
qualification is again the setting: 1930’s Long Island (the musical having been
transferred from Philadelphia’s Main Line for reasons comprehensible only in
Hollywood).
The Round
House booked High Society,
The Crucible, The Heiress, Arms and The Man, The Invisible Man,
and Too True To Be Good,
leaving the other four available as options. Mother, as I said, didn’t
want to go twice every day (two of the scheduled shows were already matinees
because we had evening activities those nights), and she also decided that she’d
seen the Chekhov one-acts enough (including, I daresay, one that I had directed
with seventh- and eighth-graders), so we decided to select two additional
shows. I wanted to see the Ibsen and Design
for Living, so I left off Groag’s Magic Fire, about which I didn’t
know anything and which just didn’t sound interesting to me. The festival
described the play as “set against a backdrop of
the turbulent post World War II years of Buenos Aires.” A memory play
(the narrator is the grown-up 7-year-old daughter of one of the families), it
is the “story of two immigrant families, the Bergs and Guarneris [who] had left
their European homelands to find a better
life, leaving behind Hitler, Mussolini, poverty, and persecution. But
now, with the rise to power of General Juan Perón, they face the potential of
Argentina’s descent into fascist terror, in the dying days of Eva Perón, the
infamous Evita.”
So
I booked the Coward and the Ibsen, and I have no regrets over my
decision. I did a private reading (a bunch of actors sitting around in
someone’s living room) of Design
many years ago, and I’ve seen the considerably bowdlerized
1933 flick (Cary Grant, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins), but I’d never
seen the play—and I figured a Coward would be fun, assuming the cast can pull
off his comedy-of-manners style—which they did, wonderfully. As for the Ibsen—well, I’d always rather see
an Ibsen than some unknown, less-than-intriguing quantity, snobbish as that may
seem. Some years ago, one of the theaters off Union Square did a
multi-year series of all of Ibsen’s plays in chronological order in
good-quality showcase-level productions, and I tried to catch any that I’d
never seen before. But I saw Rosmersholm
over five years ago, so I figured this would be a good chance to see
another staging with better production values—and it was.
Let
me make a few general remarks—some, perhaps, only semi-justified
generalizations based on minimal evidence. (I’ll brave it—so sue
me.) First, the quality of the productions was excellent. The
acting and directing was top-notch, and the festival appears to promote
ensemble playing over star-turns—and it accomplished this remarkably.
Maxwell, who addressed us at our cocktail party (which a trio of company
members also attended), said that she wouldn’t do a play like Lear (wrong festival, of
course, but what the hey . . .) if she didn’t have a Lear available, but I
didn’t have the impression from this season that they focus on star
roles. Of course, they weren’t doing Candida
or Major Barbara,
and maybe that would’ve left a different impression. She said the same
thing, sort of, about directors: if a director she wanted to match with a play
wasn’t available, she’d postpone that show until the director was free.
It’s possible, of course, that actors who want to be stars don’t make the Shaw
a home the way most of the company seems to. It wouldn’t be their kind of
work environment, I wouldn’t imagine. (But I also got the impression,
both from ordinary life observation and from some recent reading about Canadian
theater, that this is part of the Canadian cultural character.)
As good as the acting and directing were—and there were no names in either category that really stood out, though a few were generally familiar (Bernard Behrens, for instance, who did a wonderfully fractious Giles Corey in The Crucible)—the design and tech was truly superb. One of my conceivably unwarranted generalizations was that Canadian theater’s major accomplishment is not acting or directing, which is good but not astonishing (secondary generalization: potentially star Canadian actors end up in England or the U.S.), or even writing (name two internationally recognized Canadian playwrights—John Herbert, author of 1967’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, is one; who’s another?), but in production work. (Designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who helped Tyrone Guthrie design the thrust theater for the Stratford Festival, was British, but worked extensively in Canada just at the time that Canadian theater was starting to become “not British.”) Even the work in the tiny Court House (which is set up as a thrust, so there’s only one wall—and it’s the architectural back wall of the room) had some interesting design aspects in the shows. Four other shows each had some startling, clever, or surprising design elements. I don’t want to give the impression that the sets overwhelmed the acting—that wasn’t so—but the design and tech was outstanding in ways the acting and directing wasn’t. (I remember going to a show at a nearby school when I was in college—a production of Cocteau’s The Wedding Party at the Eiffel Tower—and a friend and I left afterwards saying to each other, “What a wonderful set. Too bad the actors kept getting in front of it.” That wasn’t the case in Niagara-on-the-Lake.)
One characteristic of the acting, which I think must be a unique attribute of Canadian actors, was that they can shift back and forth pretty successfully and easily—or, at least, convincingly (for the most part)—between American characters and Brits. They did well with both the Barry-Porter-Kopit upper-class Long Islanders of High Society, the Massachusetts settlers of Salem in Crucible, and the 19th-century New Yorkers of The Heiress. Then they also nailed Coward’s toffs in Design as well as the denizens of small-town England in The Invisible Man. And remember, these were often the same actors crossing over from one show to another. (They also obviously handled the shifts from Cowardy and Shavian comedy to the heavy drama of Crucible and Rosmersholm, not to mention the melodrama of Heiress. This isn’t something American can’t do, of course, but we don’t tend to do it very much in our theater since this kind of rep isn’t common here—outside of college theaters, I guess. It’s still worth pointing out, though.)
You may notice that I don’t make the same compliment
regarding going from straight plays to musical comedy. As I suggested
earlier, “Canadian” and “musical” is not a pairing I’d have come up with.
In another potentially unwarranted generalization, I’ll suggest that musical
theater isn’t a Canadian metier. As far as performances are concerned, High Society,
which was the first of our shows on Tuesday evening, was the most
lackluster show of the trip. Now, I have to acknowledge that
part of the problem with High Society was certainly the
material, so maybe the Canuck actors could’ve done better with better
material—say, My
Fair Lady (since we’re talking Shaw). The movical was
presented at the 850-seat Festival Theatre, opened in 1973.
[This
ends Part 1 of “The 2006 Shaw Festival”; please come back to ROT on 11 December
when I’ll post Part 2, which begins with the production of Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible on Wednesday afternoon, 9 August,
and finishes up the week of our visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake. The performance reports for Arms and The Man and Too True To Be Good also appear in Part 2, along with some
pithy observations. I hope ROTters will return.
[The
question regarding Canadian playwrights is kind of a cheat, by the way. John Herbert (1926-2001) isn’t so well known
as his play, Fortune and Men’s
Eyes, which became an international success in 1967. It’s probably a mark of something about
Canadian culture that the play is not only unrecognized by most people as a
Canadian creation, but that its world première was in New York City because no
theater in Canada would produce it until 1969.]
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