Northward into the Past: Shaw Festival, Richard Monette, 9/11

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario --

This is the 27^th or 28^th consecutive September (did I start in 1981 or 1982?) that I've brought a theater tour to the Shaw Festival here in the heart of Canadian wine country, first under the banner of the Pitt Informal Program but for nearly 20 years under that of the Post-Gazette.

So there were a lot of memories this afternoon as our Butler Motor Coach rolled northward up the Niagara River Parkway from the Falls to NOTL, emerging from a last border of woods onto Queen's Parade, with 19^th century Fort George on the right and the brick stage house of the Festival Theatre rising above its trees on the left.

Past that, the road bends and becomes Picton Street, thick with flowers past the Prince of Wales Hotel, right to the start of the town proper where the road turns into Queen Street at the corner of King, just before the memorial bell tower. That Queen is the main street and King secondary is a tip-off that this is primarily a Victorian town. The Prince of Wales, most opulent (and, more to the point for elderly walkers, most centrally located) of the town's three large hotels, is Edwardian, its paneled, wainscoted, fabricked and embossed walls covered with glossy copies of period portraits.

There are 40 theater tourists on this year's 4-day PG Shaw Fest trip, which is a bit more than usual, but it's an easy group to lead, because more than half have been here with me before and the town is so compact no one needs much leading. This year's welcoming dinner was at Queen's Landing, the impressive hotel down by the little harbor where the Niagara River runs into Lake Ontario, just across from the American Fort Niagara.

Then on to the Festival Theatre for our first play, J.B. Priestley's "An Inspector Calls," and there is little praise higher than this: logy as we were from our early morning departure from Pittsburgh, our long bus ride and a very good dinner, it held us firmly as the mysterious Inspector Goole (ghoul?) gradually stripped away the hypocrisies of the comfortably moneyed Birling family to prove that we are indeed all our brothers' keepers.

It held me, at least, which is even higher praise, since I'd pulled an all-nighter to finish the fall theater preview and a couple of other stories for tomorrow's PG. This is a play I know pretty well from previous productions at the Shaw and elsewhere, but mainly from that famous National Theatre production that ran for most of the 1990s in London and came to New York in 1994. I particularly liked the direction of this one, which pitches it between the realistic drawing room interrogation mode in which it was written and the Twilight Zone surrealism of Stephen Daldry's NT version.

So I was pleased to discover it was directed by the same Jim Mezon who was in Pittsburgh this summer to play Herod in Alan Stanford's richly eccentric "Salome" at PICT. I'd seen him perform for many years at the Shaw, but I'd never really spoken to him until he came to Pittsburgh. In hopes that he might be in town, after getting my group back to the sumptuous arms of the Prince, I went to the usual actors' hangout at the Angel.

Mezon is in town, I learned, so I hope to run into him in the next few days. Tonight, I talked with Benedict Campbell and Andrew Bunker, who play the Inspector and Eric Birling in "Inspector Calls." I learned that Nicole Underhay, who played Salome at PICT and performed her memorable dance of half a veil, is also in town, because her band, The Done Me Wrongs (self-described as an old-school country group doing "drinkin' and hurtin' songs, fueled by bourbon") is playing Friday after the evening shows.

Most of all, I learned that Richard Monette had just died. Before retiring at the end of the 2007 season, Monette had been artistic director for 14 years of the Stratford Festival (the Shaw's larger competitor). And before that he'd long been a leading actor at Stratford. Monette was theater royalty, here, like William Hutt who just died last year, but while Hutt was 87, Monette was just 64.

And tomorrow is Sept. 11.