In the first season of the first year of Festival Lenoxville, the third play was Anne Henry’s Lulu Street. The play holds the distinction of being the first play ever officially commissioned by the Canadian Regional Theatre System under the Canada Council through the (improbably named) Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. It was presented at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1967,directed by John Hirsch. As a play-reader for the yet-unborn Festival, I was struck by its power, especially in the key role of the daughter and the similarity with a playwright I was working on academically: Sean O’Casey. Also, I was drawn to the event around which it was built, the Winnipeg general strike of 1919, which culminated in violence and apparent failure – the bosses won again.
Lulu Street had been a great success, partly because Hirsch was a very talented director and partly because the cast was very strong[1].So, when Festival Lenoxville was created with a mandate to provide a second staging for great Canadian plays that had been successful in their first staging and then forgotten – that happened a lot in those days, and, as a result, very few plays got more than local exposure - I had the good fortune to spend a lot of time working on this show as Assistant Stage Manager and as chief electrician for the run. As ASM I got to watch John Hirsch[2]at work. He was brilliant but often brutal, with actors of both sexes; today I think the “Me Too” movement would have been all over him. I watched him take the female lead apart in a nasty manner that left her in tears. I watched him leave playwright Anne Henry in the greenroom for hours because he didn’t want to discuss the massive cuts he’d made to the play without even asking her. And she had come all the way from Winnipeg to discuss those cuts. I saw him walk into a scheduled 8-hour session with the lighting designer in order to go through all of the lighting cues and light levels that the designer and the electrician (me) had spent 14 hours meticulously setting. After seeing about 3 out of 80+cues he looked up at the lighting grid and said: “Pull out all the gels and turn all the lights up to full”. And then he walked out. The Lighting Designer wept, inconsolably.
But his directorial work was often astonishing and you have to remember his past. He was a redeemed child orphan from Nazi Europe brought to Winnipeg by the Canadian Jewish Congress. Later, while working at the then Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal I saw his touring company production of The Dybukk. And it was brilliant, the visual staging out of Rembrandt. I helped with the strike of the show and I was given a prayer shawl from the show props as a thank you gift. I still have it. And I got to eat Dora Wasserman's blintzes.
There was a scene in Lulu Street where the main character (played by Ted Follows [3)) was left alone on the stage kneeling by a chair after an enormously moving scene with his daughter. The cue sequence (lights, sound etc.) to end the act into intermission was given by the Stage Manager when Follows rose to his feet. He was supposed to do that after staying on his knees for a count of 3 seconds (set by Director Hirsch). But each performance he lengthened that count. After a few shows, the Stage Manager, who had to call the cues, began taking bets on head sets as to how many seconds Ted would draw the moment out for. Sometimes we (the running crew) would almost miss the cue because we were laughing so hard. One night, the Stage Manager, while he was giving the Standbys, told us that we were very likely going to be in for a special treat tonight. Ted Follows’ agent and a bunch of his family and friends (including daughter Megan) were in the audience so we should watch for the longest pause on record.
We all placed our bets and waited for the moment. We were not disappointed. Follows not only dragged the moment out for 12 seconds, but he communicated the character’s emotional vastation by seizing the chair he was kneeling next to and shaking it violently. The Stage Manager was too convulsed to speak the cue and we were laughing so hard that the execution of it was absolutely appalling. Ted didn’t speak to any of us for the rest of the run.
[1] Small family plug: Sandy Webster, who played one of the smaller characters was my mother’s cousin.
[2] I remember the evening of Hirsch’s arrival at Lennoxville. We were at a party at a large, old house in town that was being rented by theatre staff and I was talking with Michael Sarrazin’s sister (we were both in the Masters Program at Bishops). Suddenly the cry went up, “The Black Bird!” “The Black Bird is here!” and in walked a tall, gaunt gentleman with a black beard, who appeared unhappy to be there and unhappy to greet anyone. This was Hirsch.
[3] Ted Follows was a pretty big star at that point in Canada. He was the supporting male actor of the hit TV show Woycek and had done Macduff in Macbeth at Stratford. I guess he was the second fiddle at Festival Lennoxville that year after Douglas Rain – who had just done the voice of Hal for 2001: a Space Odyssey. At heart Ted was just a Hart House ham, but his daughter was a very good actor.
