Part I Gratitude to Dave and Jane
We met Davd and Jane Foulser within our first year of arrival in Chicago in 1968. They were members of John Fry’s church. When they went to England they “loaned” us their car for the year. We remember this vividly because it carried a bumper sticker which said, “Fry’s My Guy.” One evening in summer we were stopped by cops in Jackson Park on our way home. One of our taillights was missing, we were told. Then he said, casually, “Who’s this “Fry” on you back bumper. Nervously I said, “This car belongs to a friend.” The cop didn’t pursue the matter, to our immense relief. Relations between John Fry and the Chicago cops were not good!
Over the 58 years since then, we have kept in close touch. Some years after they moved to Elmhurst and David retired, he decided to go to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. He went back again with Jane and some friends, and then invited us to join them in 2006. From 2006 until 2019 we didn’t miss a season. Several other friends were soon invited. Some years there were as many as eleven or more. Every fall we would spend a week camping and seeing as many plays as we could; some of us two a day. The conversations over breakfast, lunch and dinner were as much a draw as the plays. When the Shakespeare Theatre opened on Navy Pier, we would occasionally go with Dave and Jane. Dave, a mathematics professor at U. of Illinois in Chicago, would work out a schedule of plays each year and work out a group rate and schedule of plays and get the best seats together year after year. In 2023 we were able to fulfil a dream of going to Stratford with our granddaughter, Lucy, and the rest of our family.
It is impossible for me to express how much this experience meant to all of us. Ruth and I had never seen Shakespeare or any of the great repertoire. When we arrived in Chicago in 1968, we were hungry for theatre, but were far more interested in the exploding experimental and counter-cultural theatre scene in Chicago, such as The Free Theater’s “Civil War,” by Bill Russo, described as a “rock opera.” The Free Theater’s productions “rarely had dialogue,” Its shows “featured singers and multimedia elements including eight-millimeter movies projected onto bedsheets and sometimes even included “psychedelic light shows.””Russo wrote most of the productions the Free Theater performed. He was influenced by the style and techniques of other contemporary theater groups, including two groups founded by Paul Sills, the Second City and the Story Theatre” (According to a Chicago Sun-Times report.(March 10, 2022 on WBEZ Chicago. ““Bill [William Russo] taught me my permanent skepticism of the establishment,” said Bob Boldt, who produced the visuals for many of the Free Theater’s performances.” But that’s another story. The slide show below provides a tiny glimpse of all that our 13 years with the Stratford Group got to experience, thanks to the generous friendship of Dave and Jane that made it possible for all of us.
II Part Two Slide Show
A Stratford Journal
Bruce Woll with help from the group
2006 through 2017
Welcome to Stratford – Home of the Stratford (Shakespeare!)Festival and the Ontario Pork Congress
2006
Jane and Dave invited us to join them in Stratford in 2006, meeting Mary and her friend Sally Hunt and Jerry and Sally Meike for the first time. Dave and Jane began coming in 2002. As Mary reported, she joined them in 2003.
Ruth and I managed to see ten performances, nine plays and one musical, South Pacific. We were treated to two performances by Brian Bedford. He stole the show as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and did the same as vain, aging Sir Harcourt Courtly in a 19th century Gilded Age English comedy, “London Assurance,” which he also directed. We saw Seanna McKenna for the first time, as Olivia in Twelfth Night.
One of the most memorable plays for both of us was “Fanny Kemble,” a one-woman play based on a journal kept by a young English actress about the horrors of slavery which she witnessed first-hand after she married an American plantation slave-owner from Georgia.
Many years later, Ruth and I were on a guided tour of Hereford Cathedral in England. The guide pointed out a very unusual scene in one of the stained-glass windows of the cathedral. It shows a seated woman with her arms around two children, one clearly a black child. The inscription identifies the woman as Francis Leigh, the daughter of Fanny Kemble, who was married to the dean of Hereford Cathedral and was noted for her efforts to improve the condition of ex-slaves after the Civil War.
Another highlight for me was to see Colm Feore in “Corlionaus.” Still another was the stage for one of the darkest plays, The Duchess of Malfi. It was performed on a long black floor panel bordered on the two long sides by the word “stage.” In the middle of the black panel sits the Duchess, played by Lucy Peacock, an old lady in black, on what looks like an altar, with a skull beside her, “a sealed world, whose inhabitants wander in labyrinths of intrigue and suspicion, and in the darker labyrinth of their own minds.”
One of the most daring – and still timely – plays was The Liar by the French playwright Corneille. It was staged as a form of improv theatre. Each night before the performance the actors chose the parts they would play! In other words, they had to know each others’ parts and be prepared to take any part, with the help of the script in their hands, however! The point, according to the director’s notes, was “to explore what it is in the telling of a story that might cause an audience to give up their critical apparatus.”
2007 Season
The next year, 2017, we were on our way to Stratford, just outside Toronto, when we got a call from Arthur telling us that we had become grandparents of a baby girl, Lucy Elizabeth (after Elizabeth Cady Stanton), born that morning, September 8.
Newborn Lucy
Needless to say, that was the highlight event of the week. A Jewish colleague of Arthur’s told him that Lucy’s birthdate, September 8, was “very auspicious.” It was unusually special because this year, 2007, coincided with the birthdate of the world, according to the Jewish calendar!
We saw nine performances that week and then went on to Ithaca where we had a chance to meet Lucy ourselves.
Sally and Jerry’s son Blake, and his wife Cathy, joined us, along with Tina. We camped at the Fairgrounds on the edge of town again and ate breakfast there each morning.
Breakfast at our Fairgrounds campsite
Friday evening, we all gathered at our camp site for supper. I noted that one topic of conversation that evening was “beliefs.” Dinner included Jane’s beans and rice dish and my apple salad – with rum. Earlier in the week, Tuesday, we came home in the night after seeing Brian Bedford as Lear, only to find that our tent had collapsed in a rainstorm. One of the corner stakes had pulled loose. Our sleeping bags, pads, and clothes were soaked. We found a motel open with a vacancy where we spent the night. Next morning we managed to dry everything out at a nearby Laundromat and make it to Jack Scoffield’s lecture at 11.
Brian Bedford as Lear
We also saw a grand performance of Oklahoma in the afternoon, and a play, Pentecost, set in a former Soviet state in Eastern Europe, which I loved, though I seem to remember that no one else did! That year we also saw Othello with Jonathan Goad as Iago. I thoroughly enjoyed Goad in that role as well as in his role as an American art historian in Pentecost.
2008 Season
This year began with one of my most embarrassing moments. On Tuesday September 9 we set off for Stratford from Ithaca where we had celebrated Lucy’s first birthday. An hour or so before we arrived we called Dave and discovered, red-faced, that our tickets were for two weeks hence! We drove on into Stratford, had supper at Bentley’s, and camped at St. Mary’s. And then drove home! I kept telling myself that we had not gone out of our way at all. In fact the mileage from Ithaca to Chicago by way of Stratford is about the same is it is by way of Interstate 90!
Two weeks later, we were back in Stratford. There were seven of us this year, Dave, Jane, Mary, Sally and Jerry, and the two of us.
Dinner at Bentley’s
The first entry in my journal this week is from Thursday, September 25 after biking into town from our campsite at St. Mary’s, about six miles southwest of town for coffee and a muffin. “Balzac’s: Circumstances could not be sweeter. Good strong coffee. Glorious weather. Delightful performances. Stimulating conversation and friends.”
Waiting for an evening performance at the Patterson Theatre
along the Avon River at sunset
The only other entry is dated. Sunday the 28.th the day after we got home: “Left Stratford yesterday morning about 10 am, after a big breakfast at our campsite with Dave, Jane, and Mary – eggs scrambled, bacon, toast, roast potatoes, coffee, fruit. Off and on light drizzle didn’t interfere. Still mild temperatures after a gorgeous, sunny, warm, autumn week.”
Ruth and I saw five performances this time, Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Trojan Women, Cabaret, and Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Christopher Plummer as Caesar was terrific.
Christopher Plummer as Caesar
The play opens with a very young Cleopatra fleeing to the Sphinx to escape the invading Roman general and falling asleep between its paws, hidden from view. We then see the aging Caesar making his way slowly, alone, to speak to the Sphinx. When he does speak, Cleopatra cries out. Caesar, startled, believes at first that the Sphinx has spoken. It’s an exquisite scene. If anyone is interested in seeing the whole thing I was able to buy a copy of that 2008 performance this year (2017).
Ruth spent most of the time on our trip home reading about the financial crisis in the New York Times.
2009 Season
My journal is short on details for 2009. I don’t know how many of us there were and don’t have a list of the plays we saw, but I discovered a complete listing of the plays starting in 1953 on the web. See the link below.[1]
We drove there from Ithaca on Tuesday, September 22, going by way of the scenic drive along the Niagara River on the Canadian side to the Falls. It’s a beautiful parkway and you see the spray from the falls in the distance like smoke rising up into the sky.
The highlight of the week was Geraint Wyn Davies as Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the play within the play his character dies, only to keep popping up. Once it was to explain, again, that “the wall is down.” Davies’ Bottom, light-hearted, full of dumb pleasure and delight, contrasted starkly with the ambiguous form of Puck, who was ominously dressed in black. He was big, not cute, a disturbing trickster with a wicked humor.
Wyn Davies as Bottom
We also saw Wyn Davies as Caesar, Ben Carlson as Brutus, and Jonathon Goad as Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Brian Bedford was magnificent as Lady Bracknell in the Importance of Being Earnest. In the final scenes of Macbeth there were ominous black electronic monitors peering down at everything happening.
We had dinner one evening at the York Street Tearoom when it was still across from the Visitor’s Center. I believe Jane, Dave, Mary, Jerry and Sally were there.
2010 Season
My journal is sparse again for 2010. Fortunately I have pictures showing the nine of us: Dave, Jane, Sally, Jerry, Bruce T., Karen, Tina, and Ruth and myself.
The 2010 gang
Plays included A Winter’s Tale, with Ben Carlson as King Leontes, Two Gentlemen of Verona, the musical, Kiss Me, Kate, As You Like It, Dangerous Liaisons, The Tempest, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and King of Thieves.
The Tempest at the Festival Theatre was powerful, totally captivating. I felt as if the whole audience was caught up in the energy, words, spectacle, story, beauty, conflict. There were lively discussions of Dangerous Liaisons, as well as the despicable behavior of the two “gentlemen” of Verona towards Silvia and Julia, and the silence of the women at the end, as well as the value of theatre for real life, a perennial question. Not for the first time we wondered how Shakespeare’s dramatic genius would have responded to the explosive, megaphone powers of the media today.
We attended a presentation by the Technical Director of the Avon Theatre and were informed that there were 500 light cues for The Tempest, 105 sound cues. Saturday night we had supper of stew and couscous at the campsite. It started to rain as we were finishing supper. Sunday morning, we had breakfast, packed up our wet tent, went into Stratford for lunch at the breakfast place next to Balzac’s, saw Jacques Brel in the afternoon, and then drove home to Chicago. Whew! I couldn’t do that today.
2011 Season
In preparation for the 2011 season we all got together in the winter in Chicago to enact scenes from Richard III, which we would see later in the year. Sam Thomas, Bruce T.’s son joined us around the table in Hyde Park.
Dinner Together in Chicago
I came across a book by Antony Sher, who played Richard III with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984 and wrote a memoir about his year-long experience preparing for the part. It included delightful sketches. Here’s one that gives you an idea of what he was imagining. He ended up using a cane to help convey the “bottled spider,” the phrase from the play that inspired his performance.
Richard III as the “bottled spider”
In the 2011 Stratford performance of Richard III, Seanna McKenna played Richard III. I’ve been spoiled by the movie version starring Ian McKellan as the king. It opens with a scene of a general sitting quietly at his desk in his war office at night by himself. The only sound is a ticker-tape machine chattering occasionally. Suddenly the general looks up. Everything is silent. Then, after a few seconds, a cup on the desk begins to rattle. Then we hear other sounds that get louder and louder until suddenly, a tank bursts through the wall with the long snout of the barrel of a gun pointing directly at the king. From behind the tank a figure steps in sight wearing a gas mask and heads towards the king and proceeds to kill him. He then takes off his mask and we see that it is Richard. The movie is staged as if it were 1930s Nazi Germany.
The most delightful moment of the 2011 season was the opening scene of Camelot at the Festival. A young King Arthur is sitting in a tree at the center of the stage, its branches shimmer with gold leaves. He is talking to someone, or something, that turns out to be a hawk that has swooped down and is flying around the tree, and the hawk turns out to be Merlin, trying to get his attention. Wyn Davies caught the spirit of a young, idealistic Arthur perfectly.
The whole gang was there, Dave, Jane, Sally, Jerry, Mary, Tina, Bruce T. and Karen, and the two of us. We met another couple for dinner that week, Anita and Paul Jencks, friends of the Foulsers, who shared the membership that year. Some of us again saw ten plays, some not so many! It was a feast of good performances, including Grapes of Wrath, Brian Dennehy in Twelfth Night, Ben Carlson in The Misanthrope, Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming with Brian Dennehy and Stephen Ouimette, as well as the Merry Wives of Windsor and Superstar!
The play that provoked the most discussion was Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a horrifying tale of cruelty, violence, and revenge, including a human sacrifice offered up to the gods by Titus. It opens with the victorious Roman general, Titus, marching into Rome with his troops. They wheel in a large cage with a woman visible inside. On top of it are two corpses. The woman in the cage is the Queen of the Goths, taken prisoner by Titus, and it is her oldest son whom Titus sacrifices at the request of his sons.
To this day whenever I think of Titus Andronicus I also think of Camelot. Despite its delightful opening and the marvelous music, Camelot ends with the tragedy of Arthur committed to taking revenge for the sake of love and friendship, violating the rule of law that he had committed himself to.
Hosanna was also emotionally wrenching. Hosanna is a drag queen, a he who becomes a she. In the play she relives one evening in which, moment by moment, step by step, she descends into the hell of humiliation and shame, stripping herself of “layers and layers of artifice.”
2012 Season
Some of the group at dinner
The first plays we saw this season were Henry V in the afternoon, and Cymbeline in the evening. After we got back to our campground away from town that night the sky was clear and dark. “The poring dark fills the wide vessel of the universe,” the chorus cries in Henry V, the night before the decisive battle. It was cold, with no wind (at our campground!). The stars were bright as could be. Often when I have gotten up in the early morning and gone outside the tent, I have seen Orion rising up from the horizon.
Much Ado About Nothing starred Ben Carlson as Benedick. Here are some of Beatrice’s insults “It is a man’s office, but not yours.” “If I have caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ere ‘a be cured.” “He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat.” “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.” Benedick gives as good as he gets: “Oh, God, sir, here’s a dish I love not! I cannot endure my Lady Tongue.” 42nd Street was sheer musical, dancing fun. The extreme intensity of Elektra was disturbing.
2013 Season
We watched Laura marching Lucy and three friends off to catch the bus to school in the rain, all four holding umbrellas and shouting “quack, quack, quack!” We stopped at a fruit stand just out of town to stock up on peaches and tomatoes and arrived at the campground in St. Mary’s just after 4 PM. After we pitched our tent, we drove into Stratford and met Dave, Jane, Tina, Mary, Sally, Jerry, and their daughter Mercy at Bentley’s for supper.
While we ate, I heard high praise for Waiting for Godot and were able to get a ticket for that night’s performance. Ruth wasn’t interested. The cast included Stephen Ouimette, Brian Dennehy, and Tom Rooney. For me the most striking thing about the evening was to learn from the program notes that Samuel Beckett had hoped Charlie Chaplin would take in the play. Beckett loved slapstick, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers! Fiddler on the Roof was grand, with Scott Wentworth as Tevye.
Scott Wentworth as Tevye
Other plays included Tommy, Othello, Blithe Spirit. Looking back on the week the morning after we got home, we reveled in the memory of days filled with ecstatic moments, intense, powerful; moving us in an ongoing dance, demanding our whole body and soul.
My mind dances as images, notions, wisps of ideas flit by and flit away, Orion one night so bright, so clear, so near, in a black, black campground sky, whole earth quiet and still for one blissful, sweet moment; Lucy, with wet eyes, mourning broken beads, and wondering to Ruth if perhaps the breaking was part of the “ecosystem” of beads (A Montessori kid!); the annual gathering of our Stratford circle to eat together, talk again, listen to each other describe what affected us; Lucy Peacock and Sarah McKenna, grand in Mary Stuart; Wyn Davies’ boyish glee at fleeing the responsibilities of Dukedom in Measure for Measure; Shylock (played by Scott Wentworth), broken, destroyed, ground to the ground as everyone else celebrates their “righteous” victory, utterly indifferent to his end, no one exhibiting the slightest remorse, no one struck by the thought that they had urged mercy so eloquently on Shylock, only to justify in the end their own claims to justice in showing him no mercy.”
Scott Wentworth as Shylock
2014 Season
We started off the week Tuesday afternoon with a performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream that I shall never forget. Thanks to Dave we had seats front and center, four rows from the stage. As we waited for the performance to begin, members of the case gathered around the stage, seated on the steps. The first few rows were decorated with white bows. One of the actors dressed in a business suit was walking around on the stage with an iPad in his hand, looking very official. Another was talking on an iPhone.
A blindfolded couple, two men, one Black, one Caucasian, are led onto the stage. When they reach center stage, their blindfolds are removed, and everyone calls out “Surprise.” The guy in the suit, the master of ceremonies, informs them, “We have a little entertainment for you.” And the play begins. We, the audience, are present as guests at a gay, mixed-race wedding. Egeus enters, complaining that his daughter, Hermia, refuses to obey his wishes that she marry Demetrius. Egeus, it turns out, is mute. As he signs his outrage, his lines are translated for all to hear, giving the outrage a double force. There were other marvelous touches. Hermia and Lysander are a lesbian couple. One of them after a chest bump exclaims and grabs herself with surprise when it hurts! There is byplay between the cast and audience of guests. As one actor leaves the stage he says to us, “Bye guys.” Mike Shara, who reminds me of Jim Carey, played a goofy Demetrius. At one point as Demetrius is being put to sleep, he complains, “I have more lines.”
Stephen Ouimette stole the show as Bottom. At one point he walks around wearing a cookout apron with the words, “Daddio of the Patio.” When Bottom wakes up from his dream and discovers no one around, he begins to remember his dream, but finds it beyond description: “I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” But he then proceeds to rehearse how he will describe it to the others. “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom: and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke.”
Stephen Ouimettte as Bottom
In the course of this speech, Bottom utters these lines: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his ear to report, what my dream was.” The program notes point out that this is a garbled version of words from the Bible, where Paul, in 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” It goes on to say that the Spirit will reveal them because “the Spirit searches all things, yea the deep things of God.” The program notes call attention to the fact that in the Tyndale translation of the Bible, this last line goes, “for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the bottom of God’s secrets”
The author of the program notes goes on to suggest that “it is the lunatic, the lover and the poet who graze the ineffable with their leaps of imagination. Bottom the weaver is a humble version of all of these combined,… a reminder that he of all the characters comes closest to getting to the bottom of what is important.” I don’t know about that, but I do know that I was transported by this Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Two other plays were glorious celebrations of the imagination, Crazy for You, and Man of La Mancha. As if that weren’t enough, we also saw Seanna McKenna’s gut-wrenching performance as Mother Courage, “the hyena of the battlefield.”
2015 Season
Sadly, Jerry and Sally couldn’t make it this year. Two new members joined us, however, Pat Jen and her son Andy Costello. Andy drove up Friday afternoon in time to see Possible Worlds, along with Dave, Bruce and Karen, and Pat. Afterward the whole group, including Ruth, Jane, Tina, and Mary had dinner at the Little Red Restaurant, which Mary had discovered in St. Mary’s. Delicious lamb curry was the specialty, along with very good wine. The whole group then drove back into Stratford where we all saw Oedipus Rex at the Patterson.
We were able to rent a room at the Community Centre next to the Patterson Theatre again this year for lunch and dinner. It came with a piano and one evening Dave and Andy sat down and played together.
Three scenes from an evening in the Community Centre
Other performances during the week included Hamlet, She Stoops to Conquer, Pericles, Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Alchemist. Stephen Ouimette was at his most brilliant madcap best in The Alchemist, juggling one con after another.
Stephen Ouimette as The Alchemist
There were two musicals, Sound of Music and Carousel. Dave, Ruth and I saw the Physicists, and Dave saw The Last Wife Sunday afternoon at the end of the week, about Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, the only one to survive him. Several of us saw it last year when Timeline Theatre staged it.
Several of us also took the tour of the Festival backstage which has a range of craft workshops equipped to make anything that might be needed. Some of us also took a tour of the warehouse which stores acres of costumes, props, scenery from the Festival’s half-century history. I was fascinated to see a series of masks that, we were told, had been used in Oedipus Rex the second year of the Festival, in 1954, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the first Artistic Director. The archivist at the warehouse told us we could see a recording of that performance if we arranged it ahead of time. In 2016 Ruth and I were able to watch the recording on a computer screen; a powerful experience.
This was the year we gave in and didn’t camp. One spur was our experience in 2015 when we had a drenching downpour that sent Ruth and me to a motel again. Instead, Mary, Pat and Brenda Froese together found us the perfect B&B, the Richard III House, three blocks from the Studio Theatre and within walking distance of the other three venues. Six of us stayed there, Dave and Jane, Mary, Tina and Ruth and myself. Pam, Brenda, and Andy found another B&B, as did Bruce and Karen. The Richard III house had a grand dining room with a table that seated all eleven of us. On Monday, Ruth and I met up with Mary, who was coming from the east coast, and caravanned to Stratford. Tuesday, we all ate lunch together, prepared by Pat and Brenda, in our luxurious dining room.
Lunch at Richard III
The highlight of the week was Breath of Kings. This was a rich adaptation of four of Shakespeare’s history plays, divided into two parts. We saw the first part, Rebellion, Tuesday afternoon, drawn from Richard II and Henry IV Part I.
It opens on a stage strewn thick with brown mulch. Four nuns in black enter and move to the center of the stage around what we discover is an empty grave. They begin quietly chanting. Then a crowned figure enters from the left side of the stage, slowly strides toward the grave, taking off his robes until he is down to his underclothes. At the grave he takes off the crown and steps down into the grave, lies down, and the tomb is covered. A few minutes later, the women open the tomb, the king rises, steps out, this time on the right side of the stage. He puts on the robes and the crown and walks off the stage. No words are spoken. I was mesmerized. Since one of the themes that runs through Richard II is the idea that the king, like Christ, has two bodies, the human one that dies and the kingly divine body that lives on, I took this scene to be enacting what happens when a new king succeeds to the throne: The king is dead, long live the king.”
Wednesday afternoon we saw the second part, Redemption, continuing the history with Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V. Breath of Kings was created by Graham Abbey. In the program notes he tells the story of how the idea for this adaptation was born. On the morning of September 11, 2001 he and other acting colleagues woke up in upstate New York, ready to drive to Stratford for the evening’s performance of Henry V. Soon after they started they heard the news of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. They began racing for the border and crossed seven minutes before it was shut down. That night, he reports, “I remember walking down to the Tom Patterson Theatre to join a stunned crowd of actors at the stage door and patrons in the lobby.” There had been some debate about whether to go on with the show. “I recall the late Douglas Campbell’s adamant pleas that we must speak the words of Shakespeare’s great histories on that day of all days.” After the show, a man came to his dressing room and explained that he was from New York and had spent the day trying to make contact with his family without success. “The only thing I could think to do tonight was to turn off CNN and come and listen to Shakespeare.”
One of the highlights of the week was lunch on Saturday. We were guests of neighbors, Hammond and Judith. Jane met Hammond earlier in the week when she was in the van and a strange man began walking around it and peering in the windows. She opened the door and invited him in. It turned out to be Hammond. He had worked for Ford Motor Company for many years and so had a professional interest in the van. Jane invited him and Judith to lunch, and they reciprocated. The story of their marriage is the stuff of fairy tales. They were next door neighbors growing up in England and then went separate ways. Much later they reunited and married. They are delightful. Their home is full of art and mementoes, including a firing pin that Hammond’s father clutched in his hand when he was taken off the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. Their dining room sideboard is a lovely long, polished workbench equipped with wood vices.
Lunch at Richard III with Hammond on the left
and Judith on the top right
Friday evening after Hypochondriac the whole gang gathered at Richard III. Jane popped popcorn, and we all sat around the dining room table and talked. Saturday we were guests at lunch and in the afternoon enjoyed a grand performance of Chorus Line, and As You Like It in the evening.
Balzac’s Sunday morning was bubbling with conversation, rising and falling; bags of coffees, teas, Balzac looking down on the scene from the walls, a baby squealing, calling “Moommm” loudly, many-colored cups and cutlery rattling, chairs scraping, full of life, the smells of the coffee, the taste of the mixed fruit muffin still in my mouth. Sunday at noon we met Pat, Brenda, and Andy for lunch at the restaurant in the old Church on Brunswick Street across from the Studio and then headed home.
2017 Season
Festival Theatre scenes. Two dogs sit at the driveway entrance
Monday evening we all gathered for dinner around the Richard III dining room table. Pat and Brenda served chicken and meat pot pies from Toronto, salad, and chocolate treats for dessert. Bruce and Karen had stopped in Grand Rapids to pick up Sally. As usual there was non-stop conversation. Jane report on a session at their church on white privilege, and another session on the history of black membership in the UU church in the early 20th century that has long been overlooked. She also told the story of how she got hooked on Shakespeare. It was seeing Graham Abbey in a long black coat. He was playing Petrucchio in a performance of Taming of the Shrew set in Las Vegas!
Tuesday morning my heart sank when I discovered that Balzac’s assorted blueberry, raspberry, and mixed berry muffins were no longer coming from the same bakery. I was told that the bakery that supplied them had gone out of business. You think I’m exaggerating! I knew where the bakery was located and Wednesday morning I went by to see whether in fact it was closed. I got there and learned that it was reopening that morning. I was the first customer there and picked up several muffins and one of their cinnamon rolls. The week was saved. The owner, Christine, had been sick and then had to replace her oven. I was there every morning after that and she had a steady stream of customers from the beginning. In fact she sold out within a couple of hours on Thursday.
“The” Bakery
Ruth and I had never seen Guys and Dolls. We were both delighted. The cast (of Guys and Dolls) was marvelous; Alexis Gordon as Sarah Brown, the evangelist, Sean Arbuckle as Nathan Detroit, Evan Buliung as Sky Masterson, and Steve Ross as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, one of the gamblers. Ruth reports that “watching the ‘Save a Soul Mission’ band march around the stage, brought back childhood memories of accompanying my parents and other adults to a ‘skid row’ park in Newark, New Jersey. I must have been about 12. My Dad played hymns on the accordion, my Mother sang, someone else preached, and my younger brother and I walked around the park handing out small red booklets containing the Gospel of John to the various men sitting on the park benches. We were in the serious business of saving souls!”
Plays this year included The Virgin Trial (harrowing), by Kate Hennig, who also wrote The Last Wife; Tartuffe (deeply satisfying with Tom Rooney as an exquisitely unrepentant hypocrite and Graham Abbey as the maddeningly blind dupe); Bakkhai, starring Lucy Peacock, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Timon of Athens; Twelfth Night (Sir Toby Belch played by Wyn Davies to my great delight). In Bakkhai Lucy Peacock plays the role of a mother. Agave, who, thinking that she is tearing a boar to pieces with her bare hands and parading before the city in ecstasy holding a bag which holds its head, discovers that it is her son whom she has killed. “Agave’s story is nightmare,” Peacock says, and she had nightmares preparing for it over the winter.
Ruth’s memory of that evening was different. “Back last November after reading the description of The Bakkhai, I thought ‘Nope – not for me.’ And I chose Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore instead – a play I knew and loved. Guaranteed to be delightful. That night, when I arrived back at the house after the play, I came upon all the others sprawled out on the couches and chairs, looking exhausted and miserable.‘You made the right choice’ they said. I was the only one who was happy that night!”
The two most interesting plays this year were The Komagata Maru Incident, and The Breathing Hole. The Breathing Hole, which Ruth and I did not see, is both a story about climate change and about Canada’s past – and future, told by following the journey of a polar bear through five centuries of history! It was directed by the Festival’s first Inuit director, Reneltta Arluk and featured eight indigenous actors, as well as a team of indigenous artists. I believe that Bruce and Karen and Pat and Andy saw it.
The Komagata Maru Incident is a blunt look at Canada’s racist past, exemplified in the spectacle of a ship that docked in Vancouver in 1913 with several hundred immigrants from India aboard. All but twenty passengers were denied permission to disembark and after three weeks were forced to return to India, despite the fact that the majority were veterans of the British Army and all were British subjects, citizens of the British Commonwealth. The circus-like spectacle of the ship’s presence in the harbor for three weeks captured by the play made it all the more disturbing. The ship’s passengers are represented by the single figure of a mother on the deck looking at the land, singing songs, telling stories, and trying to feed and comfort her children.
Before we said goodbye to Stratford and left for home Monday morning, I drove to the town of Shakespeare a few miles east of Stratford to buy fresh peaches to take with us. Earlier in the week I had discovered Shakespeare Pies, a Mennonite pie store that also sells fresh peaches. It’s a beautiful little place right on the road between the two towns. On the wall beside the counter was a statement of principles which I glanced at while waiting to be served. Along with service, commitment, and others that are common, one, “systems,” surprised me. That’s a principle usually associated with technology and big industry, but it was defined in terms of the idea of the interdependence of the whole on each of its parts and persons. It’s a principle we in the U.S. don’t seem to be able to appreciate. After packing our peaches, we drove home under sunny skies on a lovely, warm day. As I write this David has just sent us the schedule for next year’s season! See you all then.
III. Stratford 2017 Journal
This is a more detailed journal account of one season, one week
Monday 9/11
Arrived about 3:30. Dinner Monday evening with everyone present. Non-stop conversation – Dave and Jane, Bruce and Karen, who brought Sally Tina, Mary, Pat and Brenda. Pat and Brenda organized dinner – chicken and meat pot pies from Toronto, salad, chocolate treats for dessert. Conversation topics to date: Jane’s account of a session on white privilege at their church. Reference to Life of Bryan which is a scandalous life of Jesus and encounter with Paul. “Black hole” in UU history of blacks who belonged to the UU in early 20th century. Conversation about dying.
Jane saw Graham Abbey, who played Petrucchio, in Taming of the Shrew years ago in a Las Vegas setting, wearing a long black coat! Hooked her on Shakespeare.
Tuesday 9/12
I discovered that Balzac’s no longer sold the same baked goods. Was told the original bakery had closed. New muffins were heavy, caky. Tragedy! On Wednesday morning I found the bakery and learned that it was opening again. Wednesday was its first open day after the owner had recovered from a spell of illness and the need to replace the oven. It is called “Honey Tree Patisserie, 131 Albert Street, 513-273-9275. Christine is the owner.
Long conversation with Sally, who came into Balzac’s later in the morning. Her granddaughter has undergone a sex operation, now identifies as a male. Teaches in New Mexico? Jerry recently identified himself as agnostic. Many references in his letters to “God.” Sally told me a story about one of his students from Wright State U. who sent her an email on hearing of Jerry’s death. In a class on feminism (!) that Jerry taught, this student, who had been raised on a farm, stood up when the topic of homosexuality came up and declared that it was not natural. Then she went on. But skunks do it. Other animals do it. … She recounted this story as testimony to the classroom culture Jerry had created which gave students the freedom and courage to speak up and engage in challenging her own ideas in front of the whole class!
Talked about my Primer. Sally recommended Darwin’s Ghosts.
Saw Virgin Trial (Studio) at 2. The interrogation of young teen-age “Bess” is accompanied in scenes throughout the play with torture of her alleged accomplices in a plot to murder young Edward. Harrowing to watch
Saw Tartuffe at 8 at the Festival. Deeply satisfying comeuppance of an arch-hypocrite, con artist, imposter. Disturbing example in Orgon of a true believer who is completely duped. Another “fundamentalist.” Not enough is made known in the play about his past to be able to conjecture about the reasons for his gullibility.
Wednesday 9/13
Saw Romeo and Juliet in the afternoon at the Festival. Phrases that caught my attention: “religious devotion” of Romeo for Juliette. “Direct my sail.” “grace/rude”; “no world beyond Juliette.” Program Notes focused on the “communal trauma” of extremist factions. Discussion of the patriarchal violence.
The Komagata Maru Incident at 8 at the Studio. Stunning, highly original, disturbing.
Sally played a recording of Jerry singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof after dinner, accompanied by a photograph of Jerry that captured his character wonderfully.
Thursday, 9/14/17
Through the exploration of identity Cimolino wants to examine both the conflict between identity and self (as in Romeo’s case, what it means to call yourself something, “the ceaseless self-definition of the social media age”), and “the parallel conflict between self-interest and the greater good,” particularly through selected identities.”
Madwoman of Chaillot. I picked this play for Sunday over School for Scandal, on the basis of The Beacon Herald’s 2017 Festival Edition write up which quotes Donna Feore, the director: “In a way, this play is a call to a kind of activism – an engagement. I think it’s a wake-up call. Take part in what’s happening in your village, your town, your city. You are not powerless.” The play was written during the Nazi occupation of France.
Guys and Dolls Thursday evening at the Festival. Explosive, dazzling. Alexis Gordon as Sarah Brown, of the “Save a Soul Mission” and Evan Buliung as Sky Masterson were electric. Sean Arbuckle as Nathan Detroit was convincing, moving. Steve Ross, “Nicely-Nicely Johnson,” was marvelous – one of Nicely’s sidekicks. The only song I recognized was “Luck be a Lady Tonight,” sung by Sky Masterson as he wages all on the throw of the dice.
Per the program notes “it’s the women in the show who are its strength.” “Adelaide’s Lament” references a footnote in a psychiatric medical text! She manages to figure out the meaning of “psychosomatic syndromes, difficult to endure, involving the upper respiratory tract.” “Both Sarah and Adelaide, in their own ways, are the actors in Guys and Dolls, – suffering, yes, but pushing the plot and story forward.”
Donna Feore directed Guys and Dolls. She is also the director this year of Madwoman.
I drove out to the small town of Shakespeare, east of Stratford about five miles, for peaches. I had spotted the store on the way in on Monday. The cashier wore a white bonnet, spoke with a noticeable accent. I guess it is a Mennonite establishment. Brenda seemed to know about it. She assured me I would find peaches in Shakespeare. I went back out there Monday morning before we left for Chicago to stock up!
Friday, 9/15/17
Was first in line when the Patisserie opened this morning. Spent the morning at Balzacs with Sally, then joined by Mary, and finally by Jane, before they all went off to shop. Mary’s nephew has an internship this fall with the Duckworth campaign. He has just graduated with a degree in political science.
Treasure Island at the Avon at 2. Fun One of the good sailors spoke hilarious gibberish throughout the play. Ben Gunn, the sailor left behind on Treasure Island by the pirates lived in the trees, a marvelous acrobat! The set was impressive. The actors engaged the kids in the audience throughout the play.
Timon of Athens at 8 – at the Patterson. It left me cold, with a sense that it was too simplistic in its characterizations to have been written by Shakespeare.
Saturday, 9/16/17
Superlative performance of Twelfth Night (Festival at 2) with Wyn Davies as Sir Toby. I enjoyed the music, played by the Fool; the first time in a Shakespeare play.
I found The Bakkai, in the evening at Patterson, wrenching emotionally. It also felt confusing, as if the director had no single sense of what she wanted to do. This feeling was triggered first by what appeared to be a contradiction between the Program notes’ categorical feminist message and the performance. It provoked lively discussion last night.
Another morning at Balzac’s, with Sally showing up after about an hour, then Bruce and Karen.
Lunch with Hammond Bentel and Judith (87 Nile) was delightful again. I saw again the firing pin Hammond’s father took off the beach at Dunkirk, and his magnificent carpenter’s workbench which serves as a dining room sideboard. Hammond told of his experience as an 8 year old standing at the station in London in his macintosh, gasmask in hand, waiting to be sent off to relatives.
Supper at Richard III of leftovers. By midnight I was wiped out and went to bed; Ruth stayed up another hour with Sally, Pat, Andy, Brenda, and Jane.
Sunday, 9/17/17
The seventh consecutive day of sun. Warmer today than all week. I’m sitting outside at Balzac’s. Saw Bruce, Karen, Sally, and Tina off this morning. Brilliant red flowers in boxes on the railing, green bower.
The Madwoman of Chaillot at noon (Patterson). It felt like theatre of the absurd. The extended conversation between the three mad women, about the presence – or not – of invisible pets, felt like deliberately, extravagantly, mad, delusional absurdity. The invisible doorway to the subterranean oil that could only be opened by magic felt more playful, more familiar.
Madwoman brought to mind an Ibsen play we saw last year, John Gabriel Borkman, about a former bank manager imprisoned for stealing the life savings from his customers to invest in the mining industry. The focus of Borkman is on the moral consequences for his wife, sons, and a former lover – and Borkman himself.
Andy, Pat, and Brenda left right after the play. Tina, Mary, and Bruce, Karen, with Sally, had all left earlier Sunday morning, leaving Dave and Jane and Ruth and myself to share a dinner of leftovers.
Monday, 9/18/17
The eighth day in a row of almost uninterrupted sunlight and warm weather. On the way home Ruth read about the plays from “The Beacon Herald,” a publication that had been left in the Richard III house for us. It is published at the beginning of each season and supplements the program notes for each play.
For example, the short piece on Tartuffe, written by the managing editor of the Herald,begins by drawing an explicit connection between “the figure of the imposter” which has “suddenly dominated newspaper headlines and television newscasts. Instead of lurking in the pages of the Moliere classic, the imposter was everywhere – from hypocritical politicians knowingly spouting falsehoods to corporate leaders deliberately ignoring their companies’ own misconduct.”
Wednesday, 9/20/17
The Bakkhai was wrenching, harrowing, disturbing, a “horror story,” a “nightmare,” as Lucy Peacock described it. “I find it a very dangerous story… a Pandora’s Box,” she says. According to the director it requires the actors to be “vulnerable and sadistic in turns.” Peacock plays the figure of Agave, who tears her son, Penthus, to pieces with her own hands under the god-induced delusion that it is a wild boar. Penthus, king of Thebes, is punished in this way because of his arrogant pride in refusing to acknowledge the god, Dionysus.
Dave saw a distinction between the chorus of women who were visible on stage for much of the play, and the women out on the hills. Both groups of women represented followers of Dionysus, but the women in the hill were wild, engaging in violent, orgiastic, excess, whereas the women of the chorus were not wildly free.
In addition to the horror, I found the play emotionally, frustratingly, confusing, as if the director could not decide how she wanted to pitch it. In her program notes she admits as much, saying that initially she “tried to make it into a feminist sex-positive statement,” only to be convinced by the translator, Anne Carson, “that it was not a feminist show.”
She tried interpreting it as a comment on “how religion can pervert into violence,” but “that didn’t hold either,” nor did it work as an “examination of arrogance.” She concluded that “any political interpretation disappeared,” leaving it up to the audience to interpret it. On the other hand, a professor of theatre studies writes, in the first piece in the same program booklet handed to each person entering the theatre, that “this is the most political play you will see this year.”
I find it curious that nowhere in the program notes is there a reference to the lesson of the dangers of excess and the virtues of moderation, stated explicitly near the end of the play.
My frustration and confusion took nothing away from the sheer emotional power of the play. And that visceral intensity has stirred my interest in the historical traditions of Dionysus.
On another note, the almost non-stop flow of conversation, beginning around the dining room table Monday night and continuing all week, was one of the most important and pleasureable highlights. Thanks to everyone, and a special thanks to Dave, for his meticulous, hard work, again.
Cimolino
I was impressed again with Cimolino. A plaque on the Festival corridor wall details his career from 1988 as an actor at Stratford. Highlights include helping to secure funding to open the Studio Theatre in 2002, and appointment as artistic director in 2013. I was interested to learn that he had directed Enron in 2012.
[1] https://www.stratfordfestival.ca/AboutUs/OurHistory/PastProductions