FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
The St. Nicholas Hotel, Wm. Donnelly Prop
Part Two of the Donnelly Trilogy
written by James Reaney
directed by Keith Turnbull
August 9, 12 - 16 at the Margaret Greenham Theatre, Banff
interviews by Nikki SheppyWhen poet and playwright James Reaney was eight years old, he lived on a farm near Stratford, Ontario. It was a tranquil place where whole lifetimes were built on a solid bedrock of mundane, everyday events. In fact, life was so uneventful that come September, students would trundle home with bad marks for their essays on What I Did Last Summer because they hadn't done anything exciting enough to make a good story.
"Life was extremely placid," recalls Reaney. "Nothing ever happened. That's why the Donnellys had to be. You suddenly find this vibrant, tragic story filled with people who lived to the hilt.... It's very hard to get tragedy going in Southwestern Ontario, but this is one story that really stands out."
Reaney first heard the story of the Donnellys when he was a child. It was the one story that had stirred the otherwise peaceful imaginations of the residents of rural Ontario ever since the Donnelly murder in 1880.
"It was a hired man who told me about it... It was an eight-minute version of the story - more or less a vigilante version. Once upon a time, there was this terrible family who lived in Bidulph township, which was 25 miles from our farm. They did terrible things to people. They cut the tongues out of horses. They stole. They killed and caused trouble. And one night the neighbors rose up in their wrath, killed them and burned their log hut over their heads."
It was a dark story for such tranquil country and it wasn't until college that Reaney discovered that there might be more to it - a suspicion he confirmed when Orlo Miller published a book in the early 1960s in which he sided with the Donnellys.
"Essentially, Miller showed that there was a possibility - not that the Donnellys were angels, necessarily - but certainly that there were two sides to the story."
According to Miller's theory (which has gained widespread acceptance), the Donnelly murder stemmed from a factional feud originating in County Tipperary in Ireland. The clue that tipped Miller off to the rivalry was a sign someone painted over a well the Donnellys were using: "No Water for Black Feet."
"If you research that," says Reaney, "you discover that the Black Feet were a secret society over in Ireland who were opposed to another secret society called the White Feet.
"It all goes back to the business of clan fighting, where people believed in recreational violence. They fought for hardly any reason at all and they always fought in groups, killing people right and left, sometimes in the hundreds."
For a playwright who'd grown up with the story, the Donnellys were a natural target. Their lives had all the hallmarks of an epic tragedy: love, murder, intrigue and a long-standing vendetta. They also made for great characters. According to Reaney, they were wealthy, charismatic and stubborn, refusing to bow either to the church or to their predominantly Tory community.
"People couldn't stop thinking about them and when they thought about them they wanted to kill them - or they wanted to run off and marry them."
Director Keith Turnbull, who also worked with Reaney on the original production, agrees.
"I'm sure the Donnellys were difficult people to live with," he says. "But they weren't difficult because they were evil. They were difficult because they were strong and really creative and really imaginative."
"I think that the central issue in the play - a community conspiring to wipe out the unusual and extraordinary - is eternal, but I think it's particularly relevant in Alberta at the moment."
To illustrate the point, Turnbull points to a right-wing swing in Alberta that can be very unsympathetic to people who don't conform to conservative expectation.
"The Donnelly trilogy is the story of a mundane community gathering together in order to expel the extraordinary members of that community. And right now we're at a point where people are defining family values in a way that ostracizes a great number of families."
The St. Nicholas Hotel, Wm. Donnelly Prop. is part two of the trilogy and focuses on the death of Michael Donnelly. According to Reaney, you don't have to have seen Sticks & Stones (part one) to understand it.
"The challenge, really, is that you can't do it as a realistic play," says Reaney. "It cries out for stage metaphors. It cries out for magic realism. You've got to get horses and cows on stage. You've got to have multiple casting."
According to Turnbull, the result is a highly entertaining play packed with action, from love affairs to bar-room brawls.
"If there's an opportunity to do something extraordinary," he says, "Reaney chooses it - which is also what makes this play fun."
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