Western Alumni Gazette

Souwesto Theatre: Online only feature

Souwesto Theatre: A Beginning

By Dr. James Reaney

(This article was originally published in the Spring 1976 issue of the Alumni Gazette. Of note is the fact that the Stratford Festival is staging the first play of James Reaney’s Donnellys trilogy as part of its 2005 lineup. Reaney also just released a new book entitled Souwesto Years)

I have been recently thinking about the process of turning some ten years of research on the premises here into a dramatic trilogy that has just finished a National Tour. As a matter of fact it ended up at a theatre in Toronto with a day long presentation of the three plays to a festive house. This was held on December 9, 1975 and as I look back on the last ten years I look with a curiosity and interest that I hope you can share with me. The research, I might add, was on the history of Biddulph Township which lies not 14 miles away from the office in which I type this, an office in Middlesex Memorial Tower, (the flagtower) University College; the trilogy is called The Donnellys and is now being published by Porcépic Press as quickly as I can remember just how the 14 actors and backstage helpers actually presented this rather large dramatic structure in Vancouver, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Hamilton, Toronto, Moncton, Bathurst, Halifax and other centres.

One of the reasons I decided to leave my first teaching post in Manitoba and come to this campus was that I wanted to find out more about the land of my birth – Southwestern Ontario, or as Greg Curnoe very aptly calls it – Souwesto. In 1960, when I arrived here, I had just finished a poem about the farm near Stratford where I grew up called A Suit of Nettles, and, when I started to think about what I should be writing about and researching next, I realized that I simply had to get back to my roots. I was homesick for the Souwesto landscape and the job offered me at Middlesex College by Brandy Conron seemed a good chance to live again near such things as red-caned dogwood and yellow branched willows against the snow; Georgian farmhouses with Gothic Revival gables, such buildings as the Dutch Renaissance (!) City Hall at Stratford, such people as say “the saf” for “this afternoon” and “gool” for “goal” – “I’d like a pair of goolie skates” and a whole host of human and near-human beings and things that I had always loved and been curious about.

One of my early experiences back here (we lived in South London then in an Art Nouveau house on Craig Street near Victoria Bridge with possible walks to Westminister Bridge along the riverbanks) was to go with my father to hear Orlo Miller lecture at Middlesex College on his recent book The Donnellys Must Die. As a child I heard the story of this tragic family from our hired man, and my interest was revived now, especially when I heard that Mr. Miller had, in the thirties, collected a huge heap of legal and municipal documents with relevance to the Biddulph Tragedy from the attics of the courthouses at Goderich and at London; in the beginning this heap of paper filled with glimpses and pathways into our Souwesto past had been stored in a vault at the bottom of the tower I am at present typing this in; then it had been taken to the Lawson Library and arranged as part of our Regional Archives. The next day I went over to the Regional Archives and asked to see something; I think that at first I was rather scared of asking for Donnelly material, perhaps on the assumption that it might bite me, so that my first use of the archives here was to look up my own ancestors as they surface through Perth County documents in Justice of the Peace records (not as offenders alas!) old diaries, census records and so on.

Then one day I dared to ask for a box marked Huron District, 208, Criminal Records and under the watchful eye of the custodian (she had no reason to be watchful, but then I was the only person in the archives for days on end) I entered the really magic world of the past which can only be reached through such fragile ladders and windows as bundles of counterfoils from Sherriff’s cheque books, Court Criers’ Bills, Surveyors’ Notebooks, Chattel Mortgages (whole inventories of people’s furniture and beasts and implements), Jury Lists, Assessment Rolls, Crown Attorney Letterbooks and, last of all, mountains of blue paper containing an endless stream of Information and Complaint – the term used for the form you had to fill out when some fellow pioneer had dogged your cattle, tried to pour boiling water on you, tore down your fence, milked your cow furtively or tore down your house with you inside.

One of my first research lessons was to train myself to read nineteenth century handwriting and abbreviations; for example, for about a year I somehow assumed that “Inft” meant “infant” so that when you read “…and poured boiling water over the Inft” I naturally saw the very darkest picture imaginable; suddenly one day it dawned on me that the early Huron District backwoods scene was indeed horrible, but that “Inft” did at least stand for an Informant fifty years old and perfectly capable of running away! Now these documents where a Plaintiff accuses a Defendant of doing something are extremely dramatic, partly because of the variety of things accused, and I made them into one of the choral passages in Sticks and Stones (Part One) in order to show the social situation at its tumultuous litigious mad worst, which is always the dramatic best! For five years, I am told by the staff, I appeared in the archives every day they were open, sometimes for just a half hour, but, in the summers when lectures were over, for whole days; in those sixtyish times before the whole electronic system of locks I was often allowed to stay in after the staff had gone home and finish up some nearly finished line of research until hunger drove me also home.

Propelled by the magnetic names “Donnelly” and “Biddulph” I read all the Huron District and County archives from the beginning to 1863 when Biddulph Township leaves Huron County; I knew that I wanted to write a play about these people, but I wanted to get inside their world first and these hundreds of boxes filled with blue paper – it gets white about 1870 – were the keys to this state. Whoever filed away things in the Huron County Courthouse filed away everything, and I am eternally grateful to him since it enabled me to see not only the big stories and people – the Melady murder, the Railway Celebrations of 1858, the hard-writing of Tiger Dunlop and Mrs. Donnelly, but also the little things that are really much more of what sometimes drives us mad or sane; the condition of the privies in the various inns along the road that is now known as Highway Four – the way people phrased things: “Not a mitt nor a whip has ever been lost at my tavern…,” the names of horses and dogs, the way people in North Easthope call a stallion a stud, but those in Biddulph call him an incomplete horse! My favorite Chattel Mortgage has to be that of the Buffalo, Brantford, and Goderich Railway which lists the names of its ten locomotives – Growler, Sparkler, Tempest! Do you know that I could read Chancery records forever. I think the Court itself has vanished from the legal scene, but it seemed to handle family disputes, not always about property and money, and here you quite often get pictures of whole families talking at each other in a way that no history book ever thinks of showing you: one of my favorite lines from the trilogy – “It’s not enough that we must starve, but we must freeze to death as well” – comes right out of a Chancery document.

Now there is probably a reason for this material being dear to a dramatist’s heart; a court case is after all a drama – with its lawyers arguing so one-sidedly against each other, with its witnesses opposing each other too and with a Judge, who quite frequently in the early days, climaxes everything with a knock on the head or wallet all around! If at the time you were to have taken a Constable’s Bill to the constable who had just filled it out and told him that it would make a good scene in a play he would have laughed at such foolishness. But time going by changes all that and scholars and artists have as their duty the finding out of just how time does give ordinary things meaning. After the five years were over and I found myself with Five Legal Blue Binders filled with transcribed material, I found that the three plays of The Donnellys corresponded to three of these binders. All – all!?, I had to do was pare things down from 200 hours of dialogue and action to three hours per binder!

After a series of workshops with my own group, the Listeners, at Alpha Centre and Mini-Theatre, where we used this material in prototypes of the Donnelly plays called “Antler River” and “Sticks and Stones,” I did some more shaping until in 1972 I was invited down to Halifax to work with Keith Turnbull, a former student here on the material using local children and professional actors. The actors wolfed down the contents of the binders – and I think that in their performances you can see that they have genuinely touched some area of time not our own: for example, Tom Carew plays a constable in pursuit of Mr. Donnelly – he used to read aloud at this point a whole, real 1858 letter from a “peace-loving British peace-making constable” who was always complaining to Goderich authorities about the coldness of the “night spent watching in the woods” and the small non-existent return for all this. Very little of this material remains in the dramatic characterization that is verbal, but visibly the gestures and the inflection of voice go back to something old and papery in a box at present guarded by Mr. Ed Phelps, our Regional Archivist. Also William Donnelly’s actor has tried to write like William Donnelly whose handwriting is so extremely elegant and riveting to look at. In short, the documents found so long ago in the attics of those courthouses have been turned into words and gestures that have entertained a great many people in this country and which have given them too a feeling that there is more to us than just the Kelvinator and Chevy present; we are a nation with an intensely lived past and our minds are the better for trying to contact it. Well, for one thing, the contact teaches you not to be bored with your surroundings, for example to love them, and that is the basis for all civilization so far as I am concerned.

One recent result of the work I have been describing to you has been a desire to work on other Souwesto stories besides the Biddulph Tragedy. Our company was not invited to play in any of the border areas – Niagara, Windsor, Sarnia – and it may be our own fault for we hardly know anything about them or their past. Perhaps what all I have been describing to you impels one to do is to go on: we’ve found out what the roots of Middlesex County and Huron County are like; I wonder if people in the other areas mentioned – in Souwesto, in other words, would be interested in helping us write and put on plays about the other great Souwesto themes – I’m thinking of the Baldoon Mystery, the Pontiac Conspiracy (there’s an exciting early Canuck novel about this called Wacousta which I’d like to dramatize) and also the Tecumseh story. Our children need to know the traditions of their community, to know that we’re a different part of North America from Los Angeles and the best way I can think of to start this is to encourage a study of the past that may lead to plays, songs, paintings, books, thematic street fairs and pageants (but richer than these usually are, because more informed). If you have any ideas on this subject I should like to hear from you, and perhaps, just perhaps, we will soon try with a touring company or two and some local legends to find out if there could be a Souwesto Theatre – something that could focus our region a bit more intensely than the Highway called 401 does. In any case, I think you can see that what came out of this college and its tower and its archives is first of all, knowledge, then workshops and plays, and perhaps eventually a new direction and identity for our life here in Souwesto.

Ed. Note: Dr. Reaney is a member of the Department of English at Western and one of the foremost Canadian playwrights of our time. Before leaving for Ireland to do research for a new work, Dr. Reaney graciously took time to write this article about the process of turning his years of research into drama. Recently Dr. Reaney has received a $12,000 Canada Council Senior Arts Grant and has been appointed an officer of the Order of Canada by the Governor-General.

Alice Munro online only feature

Alice Laidlaw Munro

A Portrait of the Artist

By Doug Spettigue

(Originally published in the Summer 1969 issue of the Alumni Gazette)

My reminiscing has sent me scrambling in the mental attic for faded snaps   and scraps of Alice Laidlaw and the English Lang. & Lit. milieu of Western   in the late forties and early fifties. The album is not well stocked I’m   afraid, and I suppose there must be something disconcerting in being asked   to write about the classmate who made good. In Alice’s case, though,   there can only be respect, admiration and pleasure at well deserved recognition.   There were lots of us who had enthusiasm, aspirations, and a flair of one kind   or another. There were few who had the genuine creative gift. Alice had all   these but she also had - what shall I call it – staying power, the indomitable   will, the spark that refused to be smothered under marriage and family and   domesticity and – time. Lampman once confessed that the creative winds   blew only fitfully through him; for the real artist they were constant and   strong. Alice is such an artist.

I don’t remember Alice well from Western. She was a year younger and   I think we only took one class together; at that stage a year is a generation   gap. I can picture her clearly, though not as in the dust cover of Dance   of the Happy Shades. She was shy and small and had a very white face,   freckle sprinkled, and chestnut hair. She calls one of her heroines “commonplace   pretty.” Alice was not commonplace pretty but you expected her to be.   You thought you could stare right through those quiet eyes and the girl would   disappear. But she didn’t. There was an unexpected strength there, and   even then a confidence that some of the rest of us, noisier, may have envied.   We knew that she was writing, but then everybody was writing.

We would have scorned to work at our courses but we worked passionately for   Players’ Guild and the Hesperian Club and for Folio. Led by   Phil Stratford and Frank English and Betty Morley we acted and directed and   even wrote plays, we built and tore apart sets endlessly both in the old Guild   Room and at the Grand Theater. We lived for the successive issues of Folio,   to admire ourselves and envy our friends in print – Pat Moore and Ed   Pocunier and Bob Toye and Alice Laidlaw, though again Alice seems to me to   have been on the edge of that group. Perhaps she was less in circulation because   already Jim Munro was on the scene; I remember being told that Alice “had   her ring,” and she was married in 1951 when she was only twenty.

Much of the impetus for our creative activities came from the journalism   students at the core of both Folio and The Gazette. It was   also fanned by the professional advice of Jim Scott, who used to come down   from Seaforth fortnightly to instruct us individually in Creative Writing.   In those days most of us were writing verse. I recall showing some poems to   Jim Scott; he suggested I try prose. I don’t know now whether to marvel   more at his tact or at my obtuseness - I simply switched to short stories.

Alice, I’m sure, was working only with short stories; she began very   early the struggle to bend that stubborn form to her will. Jim Scott put me   in touch with John Sutherland of the old Northern Review and with   Bob Weaver of CBC; presumably he also made Bob aware of Alice. I began publishing   in 1951-52 with the London Writers’ Club prize and stories in Northern   Review, on CBC Anthology and in Bob Weaver’s first book   of Canadian Short Stories. Alice moved more slowly, preparing for   the long distance run. Her first stories, after she left Western, appeared   in the Canadian Forum from 1954 to 1957 and on CBC Anthology.   (For Alice as for many others Bob Weaver has been the unfailing good editor,   good Samaritan and very friendly tabby of Canadian culture.)

Those early stories - two of them are included in Dance of the Happy     Shades – established Mrs. Munro as another, and a better, recorder     in reminiscent realism of the rural and small-town life of Western Ontario.     This region, from London north to Owen Sound and along Lake Huron and Georgian     Bay, fascinated many writers of our time – James Reaney, David Helwig,     and I, and pre-eminently Alice. It is a cliché that Canadian fiction     is regionalist, and it’s partly true. But the cliché puts the     emphasis of region, whereas I would put it on the reminiscence. It is not     simply that the sense of the region fills such fiction; it does, and Hilda     Kirkwood can say that with impunity that “The flatness and dust of     the Western Ontario country roads does not seem like regional self-absorption     but the only possible soil out of which these characters could grow.”

I’m not sure about that “only possible,” though. Similar   characters grew from Knister’s Essex County soil south-west of London,   and for John Mitchell they grew north of Toronto. Hugh Garner, who wrote the   Foreword to Alice’s book, has nourished such creatures widely from Toronto   to the Gaspé. W.O Mitchell and Sinclair Ross have raised them in Saskatchewan,   and for that matter D.C. Scott managed to grow some of them a century ago in   the Hudson’s Bay posts of the Canadian Arctic. Each has his appropriate   region but there are many such regions. As Stephen Leacock said of his Mariposa, “if   you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns   just like it.”

What these regions have in common is their emptiness. The short story writer   looks back not so much in anger as in pity and terror at what he or she escaped   from. Knister’s Richard Milne returns to the childhood farm to try to   rescue from it a girl who represents the desperately, fatalistically ingrown   spirit of Western Ontario. The Narrator of Alice’s The Peace of Utrecht urges   her sister Maddy to “Go away, don’t stay here.” “Yes   I will”, Maddy says hurriedly, but she cannot, and the story ends with   her agonizing cry, “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t   I?”

It is of course the writers who cannot get away from the childhood region,   even when, like Alice, they move physically as far as Vancouver. The rest of   us may drive through one of these regions and see nothing to comment on; they’re   not scenic of forbidding, just desolate, empty, the houses looking lonely even   when a group of them huddle together. But Alice knows them inside and out,   the scraps on the oilcloth, the flies on the light bulb, the kitchen smells,   the grubby kids, dark-eyed and peculiarly alone. Her story, At the Other   Place begins: “The others liked to play in the old house sometimes.   I just liked to look around in it and think about the time gone by since people   lived here.” The other place, the place of childhood, is another reality;   for many Canadian writers it is the reality. In that terrible story   it is a place of senseless beatings and insane greed, of Aunt Thelma’s   cancer and Uncle Bert’s hate. The Canadian short-story writer is moved   by a terrible pity for the human condition that he comes at through a re-creation   of a childhood awareness that is profoundly dark.

Not all Alice’s stories are set in Western Ontario. One virtue of her   book and the quality which must have won her the Governor-General’s award,   is its range and experience. Alice carries the early sympathy and understanding,   as well as that terrible clarity, into stories of suburban Vancouver or Toronto   or Everywhere. Her style is flexible and strong; her vision is realistic, her   sensitivity humane. She belongs with such masters as Hugh Garner and Morley   Callaghan and Ethel Wilson, who keep short stories alive as a form despite   the ruinous effects of the formula-story, as Hugh Garner points out, and perhaps   also of the comfortable titillation of the ladies’ magazine articles   on sex and sickness and psychiatry. One of the things that I don’t recall   about Western in those days is what we were reading, but it must have been   close to the central tradition of the short story. We produced plays by Chekhov   and Tennessee Williams; we studied Hemingway and Faulkner; perhaps we found   our way to Anderson and Lewis and the American Mid-West where the modern North   American short story developed, and even back to James and Lawrence and Joyce   - Alice’s title story Dance of the Happy Shades must owe to   Joyce’s The Dead.

At any rate, we were reading and writing, and we must have found in Western   and its English Department an excitement that has stayed with us. Certainly   Alice found there the incentive to adapt the short story as an art form to   her experience of life as it is lived in Western Ontario, and to transplant   it and grow with it in a very different setting. The Governor-General’s   Award is a well deserved tribute to Alice Laidlaw Munro; it is equally a tribute   to The University of Western Ontario as it was in 1950.

Dr. Spettigue, an Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University,     received his Bachelor and Master’s degrees from Western (1952 and 1958)     and studied for his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.