James Reaney

• Born: September 1, 1926
• Birthplace: South Easthope, Ontario, Canada
• Died: June 11, 2008
• Place of death: London, Ontario, Canada

Other Literary Forms

Since the late 1940’s, when James Reaney first distinguished himself as one of Canada’s most provocative writers, he has amassed an impressive list of publications in all areas of creative and scholarly writing. In addition to more than twenty-five plays produced on stage, radio, and television, Reaney has written four volumes of award-winning poetry (The Red Heart, 1949; A Suit of Nettles, 1958; Twelve Letters to a Small Town, 1962; The Dance of Death at London, Ontario, 1963). His individual pieces, published in a wide variety of literary magazines and academic journals, have been collected into three separate volumes by editor Germaine Warkentin (Poems, 1972; Selected Shorter Poems, 1975; Selected Longer Poems, 1976). With composer John Beckwith, Reaney developed skills as a librettist, setting his poetry to Beckwith’s music for radio broadcast in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Like his drama, much of Reaney’s poetry concerns the power of language as a redemptive catalyst in a corrupt and evil world. Geographically set in his native region of southwestern Ontario, his poetry is essentially lyric pastoral with characters, situations, and the landscape transformed by the imagery and such diverse poetic structures as eclogues, dialogue, and prosaic narrative. Reaney’s poetry is a testament to his fascination with the musical patterns of rhyme and rhythm, demonstrating the author’s talent for iambic pentameter, doggerel, rhyming couplets, blank verse, and lyric stanzas.

Reaney’s short stories, written between 1946 and 1955, are also set in small-town Ontario. Young women with disturbing and unresolved emotional conflicts dominate the action of these stories. Beneath the calm, romantic façade of domesticity, Reaney’s heroines hide a passionate intensity, which is revealed in the often surprising climaxes to the stories. Two juvenile novels and a journal of the cross-country tour of the Donnelly trilogy fill out his creative dossier. As a highly respected professor of literature, Reaney has published works on a variety of scholarly and literary topics in numerous academic publications.

Achievements

A distinguished poet, playwright, and scholar, James Reaney has won three Governor General’s Awards for poetry and drama, as well as a Chalmer’s Award for drama. His first major dramatic work, The Killdeer, collected five of the top awards at the Dominion Drama Festival in 1960 for Reaney, Pamela Terry (director), the designer, and two performers. The numerous awards and accolades garnered during his career are but one measure of Reaney’s impact on modern Canadian literature. The success of The Killdeer thrust Reaney into the limelight of a small, elite group of contemporary Canadian writers who had a marked effect on the growth of professional theater (and dramatic literature) in Canada.

Reaney has been involved in theatrical production since his high school days, and the sheer number of plays that he has written and had produced (more than twenty-five) is an enormous achievement in a country whose theatrical traditions began to reach maturity more than twenty years after he began writing drama. One of his early goals was to provide Canadians with a portrait of their own unique experiences. As he said in a 1977 interview with University of Western Ontario News, “We need new plays, and Ontario is a very fascinating place.”

Besides the significant contribution that Reaney has made to Canadian literature, he has also been influential in his role as teacher. Through his children’s literature, his courses in creative writing, and his Listeners’ Workshops, Reaney has led a new generation of young Canadians to an appreciation of poetry, drama, and their own unique history.

Biography

James Crerar Reaney, born in 1926 on a small farm in Fundamentalist southwestern Ontario (about ninety miles from the major cultural center of Toronto), grew up in a family and a community that was predominantly Irish and Scottish. The family broke with the conventional teachings of their congregation, Gospel Hall, and conducted prayer meetings at home. As Reaney grew older, he was sent to attend an Interdenominational Sunday school and later a combination Presbyterian and Congregational Sunday school, where the evangelical nature of the teachings had a dramatic effect on his imagination. The gothic tones and melodrama of the church teachings are clearly evident in his early plays The Killdeer, The Sun and the Moon, and Listen to the Wind.

By the time Reaney was graduated from high school, he was an accomplished musician and linguist. On a scholarship, he moved to Toronto to study Greek and Latin at the country’s most distinguished college, the University of Toronto. It was during his study of classical languages that Reaney began his exploration of the alphabet and his fascination with the creative possibilities of a flexible language. He began to experiment with word lists as a way of developing an inventory of life, imagination, and experience; these word lists grew into volumes of highly acclaimed poetry. The underlying concept of the word catalogs is an iconography of the imagination—a concept that came to fruition with the founding of an unusual literary journal, Alphabet, published from 1960 to 1971. Reaney’s experimentation with language as an integral part of dramatic structure is demonstrated in his 1967 play Colours in the Dark but shows itself in its most mature form in the Donnelly trilogy, written between 1968 and 1974. The trilogy brought Reaney national acclaim as one of Canada’s foremost playwrights.

By 1947, Reaney had already achieved national notoriety as a provocative young talent with the publication of his short story “The Box Social” in the July 19, 1947, issue of New Liberty Magazine. This macabre story, which tells of a young man whose girlfriend presents him with a stillborn fetus during a church social, set the tone for much of his early writing. Reaney’s world is an unsettling mixture of good and evil where pastoral romance, rural realism, and strong strains of melodrama are held together by the common thread of childhood experience, simultaneously innocent and corrupt.

While completing his M.A. at the University of Toronto in 1949, Reaney published his first volume of poetry, The Red Heart, which won the Governor General’s Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Canada (comparable to the Pulitzer Prize). It was also during this time that the young writer came under the influence of Northrop Frye, the internationally acclaimed scholar and literary critic whose pioneering study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry (1947), was to revolutionize modern literary analysis. Although Reaney was not yet a student of Frye, he was very much a part of the literary elite at the university who were preoccupied with discussion and analysis of Frye’s important work. Fearful Symmetry provided Reaney with an archetypal vision of the Bible that became the impetus for much of the imagery and metaphor in both his poetry and drama. As Ross Woodman says in his excellent introduction to James Reaney (1971), Frye’s work transformed “in a comprehensive and systematic way Reaney’s earlier evangelical world into a literary one.”

With his M.A. completed and the Governor General’s Award in hand, Reaney accepted a position at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg (the gateway to the Canadian West) to teach English and creative writing. The years in Winnipeg (until 1956) were difficult for Reaney, who felt isolated from the creative activity of southern Ontario, but it was also a time when he forged important friendships with people such as stage director John Hirsch (who later founded the Manitoba Theatre Centre, one of Canada’s leading performing arts facilities) and playwright Tom Hendry. Both men, along with Keith Turnbull of the NDWT (Ne’er-Do-Well-Thespians) Company, would have an important influence on Reaney’s development as a dramatist.

It was also during this period that Reaney began writing librettos for composer John Beckwith, whom he had met as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. Their first coproduction, Night-Blooming Cereus, was also Reaney’s initial attempt at dramatic writing and was produced on radio by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1959 and staged in 1960.

Each summer during the Winnipeg years, Reaney returned to Stratford to write and to take part in an important cultural event in his hometown. Internationally famous actor/director/producer Tyrone Guthrie had come to Stratford (from London, England) to found the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The festival began in a large marquee in the early 1950’s and had grown by the late 1960’s to encompass the Festival Theatre (a Shakespearean thrust stage), the Avon Theatre (a proscenium arch theater), and the Third Stage (a flexible, experimental space). Reaney’s participation in the formative years of the Stratford experiment solidified his desire to write for the stage. His first attempt at a full-length play, “The Rules of Joy” (later rewritten and retitled The Sun and the Moon), was conceived with the Festival Theatre stage in mind, but it was not until 1967 that the festival commissioned Reaney to write a major work for the Stratford stage. Colours in the Dark, which was performed at the Avon Theatre in 1967, was not only a watershed piece in Reaney’s evolution as a dramatist but also a celebration of the nation itself—written to commemorate Canada’s one hundredth birthday.

At home in Stratford for Christmas of 1951, Reaney married Colleen Thibaudeau, an accomplished poet of Irish and Acadian French background whom he had met during his years at the University of Toronto. Both had been members of a small literary group at the university, and Reaney respected both her accomplishments and her advice on his writing. Thibaudeau, whose poetic style was very different from his, had a substantial impact on the tone and quality of Reaney’s writing. The often negative view of marriage and family life presented in his early works changed and mellowed after their marriage and the birth of their first son, James Stewart, in 1953. The Reaneys had another son, John Andrew, in 1954, and a daughter, Susan Alice, in 1959. While Reaney was in rehearsal with one of his most romantic plays, Listen to the Wind, John Andrew died at the age of eleven. The published version of Listen to the Wind is dedicated to Reaney’s son.

In 1956, Reaney took a two-year sabbatical from the University of Manitoba and returned to the University of Toronto in 1956 to write his doctoral thesis, “The Influence of Spenser on Yeats.” He enrolled in Northrop Frye’s course on literary symbolism and finally came under the direct influence of the great scholar when Frye became Reaney’s thesis supervisor. His studies with Frye brought together the many facets of literature and myth that Reaney had been exploring for decades. His love of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and all other literary paraphernalia of childhood began to take on a new meaning: Childhood fantasy, evangelism, and the magic of pastoral romance merged with marionettes, children’s games, and his growing understanding of the many possibilities of stage business. Reaney, who had bicycled more than one hundred miles to see the opening of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), was on the brink of creating his own very personal vocabulary for poetry and drama.

With his doctorate completed, Reaney returned to Winnipeg and to the business of teaching and writing. In 1958, his second volume of poetry, A Suit of Nettles, was greeted with critical enthusiasm and, in 1959, a second Governor General’s Award. In Winnipeg, Reaney began work on his first major play, The Killdeer, the story of an emotionally retarded young man and the young lovers who help him reach both maturity and reality. Reaney had difficulty restraining the narrative to fit the dramatic structure. He sent the play to Toronto to his friend Pamela Terry (who was later to marry composer Beckwith), and with her assistance the play was rewritten and finally produced, with Terry as director, in 1960. This first version of The Killdeer won five awards at the Dominion Drama Festival, and in 1962, the play and Reaney’s radio poem, Twelve Letters to a Small Town, won for him a third Governor General’s Award.

The year of The Killdeer was a new beginning. Reaney began dedicating more and more time to his dramatic writing. He returned from Winnipeg and accepted a professorship at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. The year 1960 also saw the first volume of Alphabet: A Semiannual Devoted to the Iconography of the Imagination and the flourishing of his scholarly writings in such esteemed academic and literary journals as Tamarack Review, Canadian Literature, Canadian Forum, and the University of Toronto Quarterly.

Reaney understood that it was essential to develop actors, directors, and creative support-staff simultaneously with the evolution of his writing style—artists whose diverse approaches to theater would enhance his writing. To this end, he established the Listeners’ Workshops , which began at the Alphacentre in London, Ontario, in 1967. The workshops were a joint project of many in the artistic community who believed that performers need to relearn how to play and to be inventive in the way children are as they engage in make-believe. Children and adults, amateurs and professionals all participated in the Saturday morning sessions, directed by Reaney, which explored sound, music, movement, poetry, play, myth, and magic in an effort to develop a vibrant ensemble theater. The freedom of imagination that evolved in the workshops redefined for Reaney the meaning of ensemble playing. From the workshops grew a core of fiercely loyal, creative people who ultimately formed the nucleus of the NDWT Company, the troupe with which Reaney worked on the Donnelly trilogy.

Reaney continued to write both poetry and plays. In the mid-1960’s, he was particularly influenced by a performance of the Beijing opera, where mime, movement, and masks replaced traditional properties and stage sets. Fascinated by the circus-like nature of the production, Reaney assimilated the experience and began work on his major opus, the Donnelly trilogy, which was to take nearly ten years to complete. The story of an outcast Irish family in rural Ontario at the turn of the century, the Donnelly plays brought to fruition the various threads of poetry, music, drama, dance, documentary, mime, circus, and magic that appear in embryonic form in the early plays. In 1974, The Donnellys: Part II, St. Nicholas Hotel, Wm Donnelly, Prop., the second of the three Donnelly plays, won the Chalmers Award for Drama, the prize for outstanding stage writing in Canada.

The success of the trilogy was unlike anything that had happened before in Canadian theater. Over a period of three years, each of the three plays was a huge box-office and critical success when it was first presented in Toronto. Even more remarkable was the reception of the trilogy tour across eight of the ten provinces—proving that Canadian audiences were as interested in poetry, drama, and local history as was the author. In 1975, Reaney and the NDWT Company took the three plays from coast to coast, ending the tour in Toronto, where all three plays were presented again. Audiences in Toronto had the opportunity to see the entire trilogy performed in one day (each play is more than three and a half hours long) with a break for lunch and dinner. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity sold out. The experience of the tour has been recorded in Reaney’s book Fourteen Barrels from Sea to Sea (1977). With the tour complete, Reaney was awarded the Order of Canada in 1975. In the wake of this success, Reaney turned increasingly to dramas focused on the history and culture of southwestern Ontario, but such plays as Wacousta! and The Canadian Brothers met with mixed receptions.

Analysis

James Reaney has said “William Blake’s poetry is the kind of ideal I have in which there’s painting and dance and rhythm and poetry and sound, a whole world on various levels. . . . I’m not interested in writing a play that’s two dimensional. It’s got to have references to your whole psyche.” Reaney had fulfilled his vision of multidimensional drama in his masterpiece, the Donnelly trilogy, by the time he made this statement in 1976. In retrospect, one can see that it is a vision equally applicable to his earliest attempts at stage drama.

The Killdeer

The original three-act version of The Killdeer, produced by the University College Alumnae Association in Toronto in 1960, brought Reaney national acclaim as a playwright. This work is an excellent model for investigating the Reaney universe of themes, symbols, characters, and techniques common throughout his drama. A study of The Killdeer has this to recommend it as well: The play was rewritten in a more economical two-act version in 1968 at a time when Reaney began mulling the task of turning the legend of the Black Donnellys into a major stage presentation, a project that took nearly ten years of writing and research to complete.

Both versions of The Killdeer share elements of romance, mystery, and melodrama. In the original three-act version, the structure of the play hints strongly of a “well-made play” formula, with a third-act trial scene in which a deus ex machina figure delivers previously unknown evidence that resolves the plot complications.

The story concerns two families who are inextricably bound through generations of greed, lust, love, and murder. At the center of attention are two innocents—a young boy, Eli, who raises angora rabbits, and a girl, Rebecca, who delivers farm eggs to the townsfolk. Rebecca and Eli are about to marry. They are the offspring of two half sisters and share a common history of horror. Eli’s mother, Madam Fay, is responsible for the death of Rebecca’s mother and brothers, and her own husband, who was Eli’s father, and she is also responsible for the mental breakdown of Rebecca’s father. Both youngsters have grown up essentially as orphans (a favorite Reaney character-type). Rebecca’s hope is that their marriage will be “love’s solution to the puzzle of hatred.” As she says, “Eli and I will untie the evil knot.”

Unbeknownst to Rebecca, she and Eli are trapped in separate but intersecting worlds of malevolence and horror that threaten to destroy the beneficent, regenerative power they represent. A hired man named Clifford, who has reared Eli, plots to destroy them both. Rebecca’s other dilemma is that she is in love with Harry Gardner, a young bank clerk whose life is dominated by his overpowering mother, just as Rebecca’s life is dominated by her sense of duty. What is common to all is that they cannot follow their true instincts; circumstances that are the legacy of the previous generation force each character into a loveless, death-in-life existence that leads irrevocably to violent death.

As in all Reaney plays, the strong narrative line of The Killdeer implies that his primary concern is to resolve the mystery and to allow virtue to triumph, but a close examination of his works reveals another purpose. Reaney is interested in exploring the subtext, the subconscious realm of imagination and instinct. He probes inside the human and social psyche, looking beneath the surface of settings that are often romantic, pastoral, and idyllic. There, he finds greed, lust, hatred, malice, and fear, but also love.

Appropriately, the first characters that one meets in The Killdeer are Mrs. Gardner and Madam Fay—two mothers, starkly contrasting types. Reaney is both fascinated and repelled by the power of motherhood. Typical of most of Reaney’s married women, Mrs. Gardner and Madam Fay are widows who stand alone against the world. They are strong personalities, powerful obstacles in the way of their children’s happiness and development into adulthood.

Mrs. Gardner is a typical small-town, churchgoing woman whose veneer of good manners conceals her narrow-mindedness, her ambition, and her fascination with things sinful and evil. She has dominated her son into a state of compliance and despair. Madam Fay, at the other end of the spectrum, is the local bad girl, talking tough, feeling nothing but contempt for the holier-than-thou townsfolk. She has knowledge of the real world and therefore no use for its false pretenses to civility and manners. She wears her sordid past as if it were a badge of honor.

Madam Fay is an interestingly drawn character (of a type that recurs throughout Reaney’s works): She appears to have no sense of right and wrong, no guilt. She is in no way the conventional “whore with a heart of gold.” She admits responsibility for the deaths of her half sister, two nephews, and husband. She reveals that she abandoned her own son and cares nothing for him. She laughs at her part in the mental breakdown of her illicit lover. Yet despite her confessions, the viewer is intrigued rather than repulsed by her character, wanting to know the motivation behind such action; thus, the author creates the curiosity that moves the play along to its dramatic conclusion.

In addition to the dominating hypocrite (Mrs. Gardner) and the demoniac yet honest primitive (Madam Fay), the play presents other character-types that recur throughout Reaney’s works. Rebecca is exactly what one would expect of the heroine of a melodrama and much more—she is candid, untainted, naïve, loving, calm, brave, loyal, and bright. Most important, she is an orphan, and like the other orphans of Reaney’s world (including Madam Fay), she is independent, intelligent, and self-sufficient. Like Polly in The Easter Egg and Susan Kingbird in The Sun and the Moon (two other young heroines), when confronted with the necessity to sacrifice her own needs for the betterment of those around her, Rebecca is willing to make the sacrifice—made with no hint of martyrdom or melodrama, as one might expect. Reaney seems to be saying that such women are necessary to absolve the play world of the sins of the other characters. To ensure ultimate justice, none of his heroines has to live long with her sacrifice: Justice is restored by the end of the play.

Two more significant figures are introduced before the canvas is complete. Eli, the unwilling bridegroom, and his mentor-tormentor, Clifford, one of Reaney’s finest villains, appear next. Eli is half man, half child, emotionally stunted by the traumatic experiences of his past and mesmerized by Clifford’s evil. Clifford has forced Eli into the marriage as a way of getting possession of Rebecca and her land. Eli is the ultimate battered and abused child. His real tragedy is that he is intelligent and perceptive enough to understand Clifford’s machinations, but he does not have the power to stop him.

Eli’s powerlessness is important. He is as trapped by his history as Harry Gardner is by his mother’s conditioning. Eli and others like him (Kenneth in The Easter Egg, Andrew Kingbird in The Sun and the Moon, and Rogue in Listen to the Wind) are all trapped in a limbo between adolescence and manhood. Such characters need to be freed by the power of love, the power of language, the power of knowledge. In contrast to these brutalized and immature male characters, Reaney presents female characters who, despite common histories of childhood neglect and abuse, have grown to be mature and self-reliant. Repeatedly in Reaney’s plays, the maturation of male characters is facilitated by the strength of female characters.

In 1968, Reaney rewrote The Killdeer, telescoping the action and characters into two acts and making considerable changes in the plot line. Technically, the second version is more adventurous: Flashbacks, choruses, significant properties, and clarified symbols dominate the stage directions. The revision demonstrates that Reaney had gained considerable confidence in the interim between the two versions, teaching himself to simplify the poetry, the plot, and the stage business. He allows his characters to be more explicit, adding a sense of urgency and eliminating much of the melodramatic formula of the first version. What feels confessional in the first version becomes exciting, forthright dialogue in the second version. By looking at the two versions in combination, one can see much of the landscape of what has come to be known as Reaneyland. Both his thematic concerns and his fascination with developing a new, exciting vocabulary of stagecraft are manifest here, as are his striking character-types.

The revision of The Killdeer was an important step toward achieving an unencumbered drama. As Reaney’s stagecraft began to match his poetic skills and his visionary gift, as in such works as Colours in the Dark, Listen to the Wind, and the Donnelly trilogy, he began to experiment more and more with structure, language, and imagery, following his conviction that drama should be a process of dreaming.

Listen to the Wind

Listen to the Wind, which premiered in 1966, before the revision of The Killdeer, is one of Reaney’s most popular and successful plays. It was this work that brought him together with Keith Turnbull, the director who has made a significant contribution to Reaney’s career. Listen to the Wind is symbolic, romantic, and melodramatic. It depends on a play-within-a-play device that allows two separate yet similar worlds to intersect. Significantly, it developed out of the Listeners’ Workshops, where the ability to “pretend” was the most important talent necessary for the participants, both actors and audience.

The play is set in rural southwestern Ontario in the 1930’s. A young boy, Owen, is confined to bed by a serious and mysterious illness. At the same time, he is burdened by the knowledge that his parents’ marriage has come to an end. Thus, his malaise is both physical and spiritual. He is visited, for the summer, by three female cousins who want to cure both his body and his soul. The children decide to produce a play, The Saga of Caresfoot Court, in the hope that the adults not only will be entertained but also will get involved and therefore resolve their problems. Owen’s life parallels the life of the saga’s heroine, Angela: Both are surrounded by a terrifying world of indifference, neglect, and violence; both are innocent and naïve, overwhelmed by the evil around them.

The Caresfoot Court play focuses on Angela’s corruption in a debased world; her life attests the dictum that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. Owen tries to avoid Angela’s fate by writing alternative endings for the play—a happy and a tragic conclusion. Thus, he attempts to determine events in the real world (his parents’ divorce) by controlling the internal fantasy, wherein everything, including parental reconciliation, is possible.

Particularly noteworthy is the manner in which the play proper and the play-within-a-play interact, illuminating each other. As Jay Macpherson observed in a 1966 article in Canadian Forum, “They do so through numerous cross-references in image and situation, and through the revelation of the capacities of the characters of the outer story by the roles they play in the inner one. . . . While the outer story is slight, gentle, and touching, the inner one consists of a series of explosive confrontations.”

The device of using a play-within-a-play also allows Reaney to present both sides of the story at once—a technique that he used again in a more radical form in the medicine show of the Donnelly plays. This device juxtaposes Owen’s reality to the deeply sentimental world of the inner play and becomes Owen’s way of “listening to the wind.” The play was a giant leap forward in the development of Reaney’s craftsmanship. One sees here the beginning of a theater that relies on minimal directions, few properties, and a large cast, and one that requires the audience to be an active participant in the creative process. It is a dramatic world in which past and present are no longer clearly delineated.

Colours in the Dark

To re-create Victorian England, in the play-within-a-play of Listen to the Wind Reaney employed a brilliant theatrical device borrowed from ancient Greece, the chorus—in this play, composed of children—which can create anything possible within the scope of the audience’s imagination by chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, miming, dancing, and generally acting out, or making believe. This device led Reaney to a turning point in his career: Colours in the Dark, a landmark play, produced at the Stratford Festival in 1967. Reaney himself described the work as “a play box”; it is a collage of images, colors, objects (toys), songs, dances, myths, symbols, and sounds, culminating in the “existence poem” that is the central image of the play and the focus of its structure.

Colours in the Dark demands much of an audience. There is overlapping dialogue, and the same actors play several different parts. Multiscreen images are projected behind the action as the plot unravels in a linear and historically chronological fashion. To hold the many scenes together, the playwright uses scene codes—codes that are held up on banners labeling them by color and a related word. White is Sunday, but it is also a flower, a type of music, and a symbol of innocence and goodness. Color, word, and symbol are signposts to the action of each scene.

Colours in the Dark is Reaney’s testament to the power of language. It proposes that there are many nontraditional ways of interpreting the world. The story begins with a game in which a child is blindfolded so that he will have to develop other senses to guide him through the matrix of life. Without the use of his eyes, he must depend on touch, smell, sound, and imagination—leading the audience to the experience of synesthetic knowledge, whereby sensory perception creates a new vocabulary of equivalents, breaking down boundaries between word, symbol, and image. What Colours in the Dark achieves is a recapitulation of the history of civilization in the life of a single individual. It is a kaleidoscope that proves “our ancestors are we, our descendants are us, and so on like a sea.”

The Donnelly Trilogy

Reaney’s masterpiece, the Donnelly trilogy, was a logical next step. In it one sees much that has developed directly from Colours in the Dark: catalogs of names, the use of local color, important chorus sections, the juxtaposition of the real and absurd worlds, and much more. The trilogy is truly the fulfillment of Reaney’s artistic vision. In it, with help from Keith Turnbull and a talented, loyal crew of actors and technicians, he was able to synthesize poetry, dance, music, and movement to create a powerfully unified theater experience.

All three plays, The Donnellys: Part I, Sticks and Stones, The Donnellys: Part II, St. Nicholas Hotel, Wm Donnelly, Prop., and The Donnellys: Part III, Handcuffs, are consistent in their style of presentation, although each has separate symbols: sticks and stones, wheels and tops, grains and seeds. Reaney deliberately uses familiar props, stage furnishings, and styles in all three plays. The best description of this technique comes from critic Urjo Kareda in his review in The Toronto Star on November 26, 1973:

The eleven performers, always present, using beautiful props which are always on view, work through choric chanting, songs, children’s games, soliloquies, plays-within-plays, indirect narration, mime, and even marionettes to express Reaney’s collage of history. The play has an exceptionally simple and evocative range of symbols and imagery; like the props, they are chosen from a common experience. The seven sons are represented by seven white shirts hanging on a line; horizontal country roads are seen as vertical ladders; the lieutenant-governor and his lady are dolls; a greedy fat woman is her “darling little laundry stove”; the Donnellys themselves are the solid stones, while their enemies are the dry, crackling sticks.

In the Donnelly trilogy, Reaney achieved the dream first hinted at in The Killdeer: He found a way to make his universal themes pertinent to the real history of the people in his community. The poetic language of the three plays reverberates with musical structures of duet, trio, and quartet. The structure is interwoven with symbol, myth, and significant props. Most important, Reaney’s vision has grown to accommodate documented, historical truth. What results is a smooth, rich mixture of language, action, structure, and stagecraft—a theater in which everything can be something.

Bibliography

Dragland, Stan, ed. Approaches to the Work of James Reaney. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1983. Northrop Frye’s influence on Reaney is the subject of two essays presented here.

Grandy, Karen. “Playing with Time: James Reaney’s The Donnelleys as Spatial Form Drama.” Modern Drama 38, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 462. Explores some of Reaney’s unique techniques for dealing with time—both linear history and a circle of myth.

Lee, Alvin A. James Reaney. New York: Twayne, 1968. A dated but still helpful biography from the Twayne’s World Authors series.

Lee, Alvin A. “A Turn to the Stage: Reaney’s Dramatic Verse.” In Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, edited by William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972. Offers “a description of the major writings …in an attempt to show something of his [Reaney’s] development as a verse dramatist.” Deals with The Red Heart, A Suit of Nettles (briefly), and the chamber opera Night-Blooming Cereus. Long discussion of The Killdeer and The Easter Egg.

Parker, Gerald. How to Play: The Theatre of James Reaney. Toronto: ECW Press, 1991. Three long chapters explore the importance to Reaney of Canada and Ontario, the symbolic and visual elements in his theater, and his linguistic versatility. Bibliography and index.

Parker, Gerald. “The Key Word …Is ‘Listen’: James Reaney’s ‘Sonic Environment.’” Mosaic 14 (Fall, 1981): 1-14. This article on the Donnelly trilogy is a model of Reaney’s use of “the sonic environment through various forms of instrumentation and vocal gesture.” Examines a large part of Reaney’s dramatic work, praising “the preoccupation with the theatrical values of sound” and Reaney’s appreciation of filmic and operatic techniques.

Reaney, James. Masks of Childhood. Toronto: New Press, 1972. An afterword, by editor Brian Parker, accompanies this edition of three plays, The Easter Egg, Three Desks, and The Killdeer. Parker sees “the interplay of man and child” as the central idea in Reaney’s work. A brief but informative analysis of the three plays is followed by a chronology of plays and works for radio.

Tait, Michael. “Everything Is Something: James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark.” In Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, edited by William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972. Tait concentrates on Colours in the Dark. He finds Reaney’s play “sui generis, a luminous structure …lyric in subjective intensity of mood; dramatic in the articulation of large conflicts; epic in its breadth of statement.”

Tait, Michael. “The Limits of Innocence: James Reaney’s Theatre.” In Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, edited by William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972. An alternative, more critical view than Alvin Lee’s essay (above) in the same collection.