Donald Sutherland
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Bill Glassco
Bill Glassco facilitated my first professional directing gig in Canada after my return from London in 1976. I am grateful to him for this. Over the next fifteen years of our checkered relationship his support and partnership was tempered by our different personalities, our even more differing political views and, on his part, a rivalry for perceived status as the “better” director. In the end, out of myopic pettiness, he allowed himself to be used as the front man to give credibility to the June 2, 1990 Board high-jacking of the Canadian Stage. He had resigned from the company the previous year leaving me as the sole Artistic Director, and making his act of treachery easier for him. His astonishing behaviour ensured our joint project/vision, intended as a milestone in the evolution of English-language theatre in Canada, of Canadian theatre as a whole, ended in fiasco. For this I blamed and still blame Bill. The board would never have dared to high-jack the theatre and eviscerate its founding mandate, without the participation of Bill Glassco. Forgive me if he remains a conflicted, puzzling memory.
Our penultimate encounter, a few months after the high-jacking, and the first and only time we discussed the events, was in a restaurant down on Front Street. I angrily accused him of stabbing his own partner in the back, a cowardly, nefarious act. No doubt I threw all sorts of other pleasantries at him, how he had deliberately made sure I would not have a chance of succeeding where he had failed. My anger was justified, my words/accusations were undoubtably over the top. His two-year tenure as Producing Artistic Director had racked up a deficit of over one million dollars. My one season had managed to staunch the bleeding, even if I had not been able to turn it around. My second season, a season programmed of all-Canadian plays, would have branded the theatre and substantiated its founding vision. He broke down, I assumed it was his guilt hounding him, and I left him sobbing in tears. Didn’t make me feel any better.
Our last encounter was fourteen years later, August of 2004, barely a month before he died. Only 69, for fuck’s sake! We had met by accident, both attending the Edmonton Fringe. With time winding down on his losing battle with throat cancer, he was taking a farewell tour of Canada, crossing the country by train. No doubt seeking to touch the breadth of the country before his imminent passing. The rocking of the train and the chatter of the wheels and rails is a great liberator of memories. He must have had a flood of memories knowing his ride was coming to an end. He had stopped over in Edmonton to catch a whiff of the Fringe. Bill asked that I accompany him on his ride to the station, he was heading to Vancouver to complete the train journey. I took his invitation as an attempt to assuage his conscience. Maybe hoping I would forgive him for his part in the high-jacking of Canadian Stage. We avoided the tough subject. I could not bring myself to forgive him, to my shame, perhaps. It was not personal, it was about a squandered opportunity to build a flagship for Canadian writers, for championing a uniquely Canadian acting style, to put theatre at the centre of a democratic discourse for the future of our country. When I see the chaotic rump that today (2023) is the remnant of the Canadian Stage Company we founded together, I shake my head with sadness. * Something about English Canada that glories in pulling back anyone and anything that tries to get a rung ahead up the ladder.
Still living in England, in the summer of 1975, I returned home for a preliminary visit, with a small travel grant from the Canada Council, to scout out the Canadian theatre scene. An early surprise on that trip, was an actor by the name of Michael Hogan playing Grey Owl at the Peterborough Summer Theatre. A charismatic performance. I mentally filed him away as an actor of note. Seeing Theatre Passe Mureille’s revival of The Farm Show in the stunning, oil-financed theatre in Petrolia literally blew me away. I can still see Eric Peterson’s entrance as a doddering old farmer and Miles Potter in a scene moving square bales of hay with his shorts on. Ouch! Wow, I thought, if this is where Canadian theatre is heading, count me in. Janet Amos was in the cast of that revival. We met after the show in the parking lot, a frisson of our previous Montreal relationship in the air. She offered a quick run-down of the Toronto Theatre scene, which included advice not to waste my time with Tarragon’s boring naturalistic theatre. But I already had a date to meet Bill Glassco and I kept it. Bill welcomed me into his Tarragon office, with genuine curiosity. He had the good habit of trying to keep abreast of new talent. My fistful of Half Moon reviews had got me in the door. Bill, looking at me like, are these reviews to be believed? You could see a certain insecurity in his eyes, worried, what if this man is the better director. What does that mean anyway? To be a better director, how does one judge?
Bill was competent with naturalistic and lyrical scripts. Less so, as his continuing career evidenced, as a director of ideas or epic or abstract material. What was I competent at? Not sure. After my “apprenticeship years” abroad I merely considered myself a journeyman director.
We chatted amiably, I trying to impress and hoping for some work, he, trying to figure me out, both as a potential competitor and also as someone who might be of use to him and his theatre. I was in the right place at the right time. W.O. Mitchell, the Western Canadian icon, (Who Has Seen The Wind; the Jake and the Kid Series on CBC radio) had sent Tarragon a play, Back To Beulah in the hopes that Bill would direct the premiere for Theatre Calgary. Bill didn’t really like the play, but refrained from mentioning this to W.O., and instead was looking for a replacement director to get himself of the awkward hook. After our meeting, Bill was good enough to suggest to W.O. I should direct the play. I was sent off to Calgary to meet “Canada’s Mark Twain” as W.O. was often referred to, adroitly killing two birds with one stone. Bill would get a chance to see my work, while avoiding any embarrassing discussions about the play with W.O. For more on my relationship with W.O., see the article in the book, Dramatic W.O. (LINK!)
That was our first encounter. Elsewhere, I try and analyse the high-jacking, (LINK) and of course have to take my share of the blame for the end of the vision.
Bill and I would, to some extent, be fighting the same battles, trying to secure the foundation for theatre to take a prominent place in the discourse of the nation. We were separated by class and politics and aesthetic values. Bill was born in Québec City of Anglo gentry. His grandfather, Sir William (sic!) Price III was, a Québec lumber and paper baron, and Conservative member of Federal Parliament. His father, J. Grant Glassco, president of Brazilian Traction, Light and Power Co. Ltd. (Which became the notorious Brascan Ltd.). William (Bill) Glassco’s private school education fed into, a Phd. in English Literature via Princeton and Oxford. Where did the Glassco family sit in the hierarchy of Québec society? To get a sense, you have to visit the family summer residence in Taddousac, 100KM East of Québec City, where the Saguenay river flows into the St Lawrence, a summer holiday location favoured between the wars by the QC social elite. The residences of the traditional QC ruling class circle from the beach upwards along the cliff front. Your status in Québec society is informally reflected by how close you are to the beach and to the golf club. The Glassco residence is first in line, overlooking the beach itself. I was able to experience this in person when Bill graciously invited the core artistic group of the birthing Canadian Stage Company for a long weekend of mandate discussions. (LINK)
Bill Glassco’s forte was his casting. Once he got that right, he wisely left the actors do their work. He also made sure to hire the latest “hot” designer and let them get on with their job. He was never a director’s director with a strong pro-active vision that united visuals, sound, acting style and text to deliver an artistically coherent evening of theatre. He remained what he started out as, an English professor benignly dabbling in theatre, he was never a professional. I can’t actually think of a single production he directed that had any memorable directorial brilliance. After he was appointed AD at Centre Stage, he chose to inaugurate his first season with a production of Congreve’s Love for Love. With the clout of the largest resident theatre company, he was able to assemble an all-star cast including Fiona Reid, Eric Peterson, Brent Carver and Susan Wright. Bill and I were already beginning our discussions on a merger of our two theatres. I dropped in on a dress rehearsal of the production, arriving at the back of the darkened theatre just in time to see Susan Wright stop the run, come to the front of the stage and yell out to Bill in the house, “Are you gonna get up here and cut this piece of shit?” God bless, Susan. The production was a disaster. Talking to the cast backstage after opening night, was like being at a funeral. Yes, Bill’s major successes were in naturalistic theatre.
Susan Wright, bless her. She had taken over the role of Irene for the 1982 British tour of Balconville. We had a flirtatious but innocent relationship after that. “Kiss me”, she was wont to say, with a theatrical frisson, after a few drinks. She died tragically in 1991 in a Stratford house fire, asphyxiated running to the top floor trying to rescue her visiting parents.
A tall man, Bill Glassco, with an aura that radiated his Québec-Anglophone origins and his private school and Princeton/Oxford education. Difficulty resisting the temptation of snobbery in most situations. I have a stomach-churning memory of him, with a nail clipper, clipping his nails in the front row of the empty Berkeley Street Theatre during the rehearsal run of one of my productions. Not sure if he was oblivious to his insulting behaviour or doing it deliberately to show his disinterest in the work. Perhaps a bit of both. He could also be extremely generous at times, as he was so to me when it suited him. He gave me Ostrofsky’s play, The Storm (LINK)to direct for the last CentreStage season, pre-merger. I fucked the great Russian classic up, big time. What a wasted opportunity. Still gives me nightmares.
When we first met, in 1975, he was about to direct Kennedy’s Children in the studio at the Stratford Festival. The production turned out to be a critical and box office success. By the time, February 1976, when my Back to Beulah production toured to T.O. and the Tarragon, Bill had been hired by Robin Phillips to direct Merchant Of Venice on the Festival main stage. Rather ironic, as Bill had been one of the more prominent members of the Canadian Theatre community to protest the hiring of Phillips, a foreigner, to run our largest theatre company, after it had been run by two Canadians, Jean Gascon and John Hirsch. The success of the Tarragon had turned Bill into a kind of flag-bearer for Canadian culture. And as a patrician with a pedigree background, he was fully in the comfort zone of the Canadian Establishment, unlike the other long-haired, politically left-wing hippies building Canadian theatre. Bill was, by his own admission at the time, in his own words, “unsure of my ambitions regarding Stratford.” But made no bones about the fact that he felt he should be offered the job running the Festival, even if he decided to turn it down. Robin Phillips played him brilliantly. Offered him Merchant Of Venice. Bill, this upper-class WASP was enticed into the quicksand of anti-semitism in one the Bard’s most contentious plays. On the Festival mainstage no less. Rumours circulated through the Toronto theatre community of Jackie Burroughs taking him apart during rehearsals, in front of the entire cast for his lack of ability to make decisions. In the end Merchant was a critical disaster, as Phillips no doubt assumed/hoped it would be, and any future for Bill at Stratford was nixed.
English Canadian theatre is seriously indebted to Bill Glassco for founding the Tarragon, the engine of so much good Canadian playwriting and for his foresight to seek out the work of Québec playwrights, such as Michel Tremblay. I’ll confess was never too fond of Bill’s translations, they were academic nice, classless, without the arrogant muscle of working-class Québec. It was not until a Scottish company brought The Guid Sisters, their own translation of Les Belles Soeurs to Montreal that got the visceral energy of the original was captured in English.
Arthur Miller
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John Hirsch
I knew John Hirsch by reputation only when he turned up to see a performance of Quiet In The Land at the Blyth Festival. He must have seen a director’s hand/touch in the production he liked, and he offered me Brian Friel’s play, Translations (LINK!) for the 1982 Festival season. John had just taken over the running of the Festival, after the public outcry that resulted from the Stratford Board of Governors firing of the ‘Gang Of Four’ and its attempt to parachute Brit director John Dexter in to run the place. John was, I suspect, using me as a bright young star on the Canadian Theatre scene, untainted by any of the imbroglio, to be part his new broom to help sweep the mess in the stables clean. But yes, my love of actors and ability to fashion genuine moments was in evidence in the Blyth production and offering me Translations was an astute coupling of a directing horse to the plough of the play.
I never got close to John. I respected him on a number of levels, his tenure at the CBC had produced some seriously important Canadian Television drama, but the smart-ass young Turk that I was at the time was never going to kiss his ass. Yet he was still good to me. After the Friel play, which was a critical but not a box-office success, he offered me Ibsen’s Enemy Of The People for the 1984 season. When I countered I preferred to do Death Of A Salesman,(LINK!) he supported me fully. Suggested Nehemiah Persoff to play the lead and sent me off to Chicago to see him perform and meet him. Helped me land Broadway designing legend, Ming Cho Lee to do the set.
John was tough on his actors in rehearsal. It was an old-school, director is dictator-who-knows-what-is best-for-the-actor kinda behaviour. One story that circulates, concerns John Hirsch directing students at the National Theatre School in a Chekov play. John, dissatisfied with the superficiality of the breakdown one of the actresses was portraying in a scene, right in the middle of a run-through, just at the moment immediately preceding the breakdown required in the script, arranged for the Stage Manager to interrupt rehearsal and deliver to the student a facsimile of a telegram that communicated the death of the actress’ father. This provoked the desired very convincing breakdown on stage. At which point Hirsch, apparently, rushed up on stage to declare to the cast, “Dthats it! Dthat is the true breakdown we are vanting." Assyia De Vreeze told me the story, she hated John witha a passion because of how he treated her kids, the students. Whether the story is true or only half true, it is the reputation John had. RH Thompson spent one unhappy summer as a member of the Festival company, and describes with embarrassment, humility and anger being “Hirsched” in rehearsals in front of the rest of the cast. RH has never returned to the Festival.
I will always regret my youthful stubborn, stupid, blind arrogance that kept me from exploring a closer relationship with John Hirsch. John, quite openly and proudly gay, never held my ‘straight’ sexually orientation against me. Whereas I always felt a distinct tension between Bill Glassco and John Hirsch, the patrician WASP and the Jewish Holocaust survivor. Two Alpha gay men eyeing each other suspiciously. With my semi-European upbringing I suspect John and I might have been able to have some great discussions. There are so many questions I would have, should have asked him. Small mercy, I was able to persuade Glassco to hire Hirsch to direct one of the plays of the inaugural Canadian Stage Season. It was just before John died, at the age of 59!, complications from AIDS. Shit, what a loss. Robert Cushman’s review in the National Post of the biography of John Hirsch helps capture some of the wonder of the man.
John Hirsch Biography Remembers Canada’s Greatest Director
by Robert Cushman
One of the first and best Canadian productions I ever saw was The Dybbuk, directed by John Hirsch. It was in 1974, at the St. Lawrence Centre in Toronto, though it had originated at the Manitoba Theatre Centre, of which Hirsch was the artistic director and effectively the creator.
I don’t remember much about the acting, except perhaps for Marilyn Lightstone’s performance, but I do recall the intensity of it all, the atmospherics, the extraordinary visual and vocal evocation of the vanished world of Russian shtetl culture, centred around the synagogue. It was a world of great terrors and great warmth. It was in part a tribute to Hirsch’s own roots, from which he had been forcibly and horrifically torn by the Second World War, and also perhaps to his own temperament. He was also a man who experienced great terrors and great joys, and who both shared and inspired them, on and off the stage.
He used to say that he was “a member of four mafias: Hungarian, Jewish, homosexual and Winnipeg.” I owe that quotation to a new biography entitled A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch, by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson. The rather fanciful title comes from a poem by John Dryden; the book itself does a good, if sometimes too breathlessly catalogued job of chronicling both the life and the work and relating one to the other.
Hirsch died from AIDS in 1989. Seana McKenna, who was directed by him as a young actress after having failed her first audition with him, spoke — enchantingly, hilariously and without notes — about both experiences at a book launch in Toronto this past week. She also remarked that a whole generation of Canadian theatre people, some of them already quite influential, must now have grown up without knowing who he was or what he accomplished. That is unfortunate because his talents were remarkable, his influence vital and his personality unique.
What is clear from the book is that, from the perspective of the Canadian theatre as a whole, his greatest achievements were in Winnipeg. The MTC, whose origins were in amateur theatre and which he, greatly assisted by the still-feisty Tom Hendry, brilliantly transformed during the 1950s into a wholly professional one, inspired the entire regional theatre movement. That makes its creation second in importance only to that of the Stratford Festival.
That Hirsch found himself in Winnipeg at all was something of an accident. He was a Holocaust survivor, who had grown up in Budapest with a heritage that was mostly Jewish but partly Catholic, both strands vital to his later work. None of his family outlived the war, and he did so mainly by scavenging. Given the chance to emigrate to Canada — he happened to be standing in the right visa line on the right day — he chose Winnipeg over Halifax or Vancouver because it seemed safer to be in the middle.
The household on which he was billeted expected to have him for a couple of weeks but got him for life. Nothing in the biography is more touching or telling than his continued loyalty to his adoptive mother and sister whom he continued to phone every week of his life and whom he visited every chance he got. With them, he found the home he had lost.
By the time of The Dybbuk, he was an internationally known director, working regularly in New York. As an occasional visitor to Canada, I didn’t see his work again until 1980 when he directed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a highly praised production that I didn’t much enjoy; all the same, I liked the fact that he’d done it. He was a gleeful polymath, as ready to mount a musical, or even a cabaret, as a classic.
In 1981, in the wake of a notorious debacle over the post-Robin Phillips succession, he took over Stratford: a stormy regime launched at a stormy time. He was not, it seems, very happy there, any more than he had been when running CBC’s TV drama department, though he did fine work in both places. His 1983 Stratford Tartuffe, overlooked in the book, was exceptionally fine, very tense and intelligent; so, despite some critical damning, was his As You Like It. But he did leave the place in the red.
He’s most celebrated as a director of Chekhov; his Three Sisters, in Phillips’ regime, is legendary. In fact, he only directed two of the plays in Canada, plus an unhappy attempt at The Seagull for the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv; his only attempt at directing in a language he didn’t speak.
He could be cruel to actors, though to his credit his bullying seems to have been hot not cold, impulsive not calculated. And the victims seem to have forgiven him. At the launch, Alon Nashman gave us a riotous taste of a one-man play about Hirsch that he’ll be performing at Stratford next year. (Although I have to say that he looks less like Hirsch than I do. )
By the time I moved to Canada in 1986, Hirsch’s career was largely over: something I regret for my own selfish sake, and for the country’s because he has yet to be replaced. There are directors who are his partial heirs: Peter Hinton and Morris Panych come to mind, and our leading Chekhovian in recent years has been another Hungarian, László Marton; all of them more equable characters than he was. But there’s nobody who combines his pictorial flair, his intellectual reach, and — perhaps luckily — his tragic inheritance. So far, he’s Canada’s greatest director.
A Fiery Soul: The Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson ($22) is available from Véhicule Press.
Sharon Pollock
Sharon Pollock and I worked together twice. Once at Theatre Calgary for the World premiere of her play Doc. in April 1984 (We remounted at the Toronto Free Theatre with cast changes in September of the same year.) Doc is a multi-layered play, poetic in its ambitions but harrowingly honest in its portryal of Sharon’s own family tragedies small and less small. Sharon trying to understand, and possibly forgive her father while at the same time admitting to her own lack of empathy with her mother plight. Working with Sharon was a liberation. No bullshit gender politics, just two equals fighting it out to make the play as good as possible.
Sharon and I had a great communication, perhaps in part due to the fact we never secumbed to an intimate relatiojship. elow is a link to a few email exchange between us that is a nice example of a writer/director relationship.
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