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by James Reaney, directed by Andrey Tarasiuk

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

June 21-Sept 14, 2005

“A Dull Start to a Canadian Classic”

The Stratford Festival has done theatre-lovers a big favour in staging “Sticks & Stones”, the first part of James Reaney’s Donnelly Trilogy.  The recent flourishing English Canadian drama has produced few works that after so few years can be called “classics”, but Reaney’s “The Donnellys” is certainly one of them.  Students have read the plays and learned about the major impact they have had, but, until now, few people who missed their first production in 1973-75, myself included, have had a chance to see any of them in professional productions.  Now Stratford has given us that chance.

That being said, one wishes the current production were better than it is.  The 14-member cast who play 100 characters is a mixture of strong actors and weak.  The choral work both in voice and movement is not as precise as it should be, and the staging by director Andrey Tarasiuk is not inventive enough.

James Donnelly and his wife Judith immigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1842 and eventually settled in Biddulph Township near the small town of Lucan only 30 kilometers from Stratford.  They had seven sons and one daughter.  On February 4, 1880, a 40-man vigilante group clubbed the couple to death along with one of their sons and a niece visiting from Ireland.  They burnt down the house along with the bodies.  Though six people were charged. No one was ever convicted.

Reaney’s trilogy seeks to discover what could have led the Donnellys to such a fate.  “Sticks & Stones” deals primary with James and Judith’s early trials in their new country and concludes with their decision to stay in Biddulph despite the enmity of the community.  To show what happened Reaney’s play ranges back in time to the clannish rivalries between “Black” and “White” in Ireland before the “Black” Donnellys emigrated and forward to their murder and beyond to a time when their story has become legend and a fit subject for travelling players.  Indeed, its time scheme includes the present since Reaney has James Donnelly mention at one point that he’s in a play “right now”.

Reaney’s influential storytelling method is non-linear and non-naturalistic.  The entire cast narrates the action, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a chorus, until the action crystallizes into dramatic scenes which the rest may comment on even as they progress.  The scenes are linked associatively, more by theme than by cause and effect.  Indeed, the point is to show what a tangled number of causes can combine to bring about a single effect, in this case the murder of an entire family. 

In her production notes, designer Victoria Wallace says that she and director Andrey Tarasiuk asked themselves, “What’s the least we can work with in terms of visuals and props?”  While the original production used a great many props, she says “This new approach gave us an opportunity to listen to the words, the wonderful poetry of the work”.  That sounds admirable but it misses the point that what made the Donnelly Trilogy so successful was the very theatricality that they are attempting to avoid.  Besides that, if it is minimalism he is after, Tarasiuk should have tried to reduce the cast even further so that so more of them could spend more time acting than standing about. 

In his minimalist staging, Tarasiuk does achieve some good effects.  One time he has the cast divide into two lines, each person holding a stone, sometimes clashing with each other, sometimes carrying it to the other side and setting it down to show how the borders of the Donnelly farm shift back and forth over the years.  Another time he has four men of the cast hoist Andrew Massingham as Tom Cassleigh on their backs suddenly becoming Cassleigh’s wagon and horses.  In these instances Tarasiuk uses the cast’s actions imaginatively to reinforce the text.  Far too often, however, his imagination does not rise to the level of the text and he is content merely to move the 14-member cast into different geometric patterns that don’t necessarily have anything to do with what they are saying.  He calls the play a “tell-and-show” piece, but in his hands there is too much telling and not enough showing.

It doesn’t help that the acting abilities of the cast are so uneven.  Diane D’Aquila as Judith Donnelly give the best performance in the show.  More than anyone she brings out the rough beauty of Reaney’s poetry and creates a character filled with vitality and indomitable will.  Peter van Gestel as her son Will also gives well-realized performance.  However, as Judith’s husband James, Robert King cannot match D’Aquila in intensity or in speaking verse.  He delivers all of his lines in the same uninspiring drone of dull anger.       

Standouts in the rest of the cast include Kate Hurman, as Mrs. Donnelly’s spite-filled neighbour Mrs. Fat, Brad Rudy as the slimy Showman taking his egregious melodrama of the Donnelly story on tour, Andy Valásquez as tavern-keeper Andy Keefe punished for doing trade with the Donnellys and Sarah Wilson who comes into her own towards the end of the play as the Donnellys’ only daughter Jenny.  While David Snelgrove makes very clear distinctions among the four characters he plays, Shane Carty, Roger Shank, and Andrew Massingham, rather unhelpfully, do little or nothing to distinguish the three to four roles they each are given.

On opening night there were verbal lapses from virtually everyone in the cast and lack of precision in the choral passages and movement.  This suggests that the piece had been under-rehearsed.  While we have to be pleased that Stratford is remounting the Donnelly Trilogy at all, we do wish Stratford would do so with the all care and imagination this classic deserves.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Robert King (centre) with other member of the company. ©Richard Bain.