Production Support Is Generously Provided by Cec & Linda Rorabeck 1 “What’S in a Name?”
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SUPPORT FOR THE 2017 SEASON OF CORPORATE SPONSOR FOR THE 2017 SEASON THE TOM PATTERSON THEATRE IS OF THE TOM PATTERSON THEATRE GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY RICHARD ROONEY & LAURA DINNER PRODUCTION SUPPORT IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY CEC & LINDA RORABECK 1 “WHAT’S IN A NAME?” In 2017 we celebrate both Canada’s 150th birthday and our 65th Festival season – a season that explores identity. Both personal and collective, identity can lend comfort or give pain. It can be used, as by Joseph Surface and Tartuffe, as a mask to deceive others – or, unconsciously, as by Timon, to deceive ourselves. But false identity, like Viola’s gender deception, can also lead to happy discoveries. Identity can both unite and divide. How can I be myself yet belong to a greater whole? Am I Romeo first? Or am I first a Montague? In an age of anxiety over immigration, globalization and Brexit, is identity at odds with diversity? In 1914, clinging to a particular definition of Canadian identity, our country betrayed the Sikh passengers of the Komagata Maru – most of whom had served in the British Army and were thus entitled to residency here – by denying them entry. The Breathing Hole and The Madwoman of Chaillot suggest a profound question: if our sense of identity can stretch to encompass not only other peoples but future generations and perhaps even the land itself, might we discover a deeper sense of what it means to be Canadian? One, perhaps, informed by the spirit of the original and sovereign caretakers of this land: our First Nations. Finally, as we celebrate our national identity, we might do well to remember that, no matter how we name ourselves, actions, not words, will define us. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” CINEPLEX EVENTS Antoni Cimolino Artistic Director OPERA | DANCE | STAGE | GALLERY | CLASSIC FILMS For more information, visit Cineplex.com/Events @CineplexEvents EVENTS ™/® Cineplex Entertainment LP or used under license. 2 1 CE_0258_EVCN_CPX_Events_Print_AD_5.375x8.375_v5.indd 1 2017-03-01 10:55 AM OUR 2017 PARTNERS AND SPONSORS WE ARE HONOURED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE FOLLOWING CORPORATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE MADE COMMITMENTS IN THE 2017 SEASON: INDIVIDUAL THEATRE SPONSORS PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE HOSTS PROGRAM SPONSOR Support for the 2017 Support for the 2017 Support for the 2017 Support for the 2017 The Aylmer Express season of the Festival season of the Avon season of the Tom season of the Studio Burgundy Asset Management Inc. Theatre is generously Theatre is generously Patterson Theatre is Theatre is generously provided by Daniel provided by the generously provided by provided by Sandra & Famme & Co. Professional Corporation Bernstein & Claire Birmingham family Richard Rooney & Jim Pitblado Highstreet Asset Management Inc. Foerster Laura Dinner Pelee Island Winery IN-KIND SPONSOR Steed Standard Transport Limited CORPORATE THEATRE PARTNER Sylvanacre Properties Ltd. University of Waterloo Stratford Campus BMO Financial Group, Corporate Sponsor for the 2017 season of the Tom Patterson Theatre The Woodbridge Company Limited EDUCATION PROGRAM PARTNER SEASON HOSTS Scotiabank SEASON OPENING NIGHT PRESENTING SPONSOR BMO Financial Group THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE STRATFORD FESTIVAL HD SHAKESPEARE FILM SERIES GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THESE CONTRIBUTORS TO OUR SUCCESS: Presented by Sun Life Financial, Making the Arts More Accessible® program CORPORATE PARTNERS The Stratford Festival is a non-profit organization with charitable status in Canada and the U.S. 2 3 AN EXTREME MAN FOR EXTREME TIMES BY MARTIN MORROW “The middle of humanity thou never and Cleopatra. The playwright may also knewest, but the extremity of both ends,” have been acquainted with Timon, or The Apemantus the philosopher famously tells Misanthrope, a dialogue by the satirist Timon, the prodigal-turned-misanthrope, Lucian that contains other elements found in William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. in the play. Apemantus, as they say, nails it: Timon is a Timon of Athens first appeared in 1623, man of extremes, a man of excesses, who in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s can’t find the equilibrium that allows others works. We have no record of its to live in a corrupt and dishonest world. performance during his lifetime and, given Even if he doesn’t actually lose his sanity the patchy quality of the text, it has often – like King Lear, the other Shakespearean been regarded as an unfinished and character he most closely resembles – possibly abandoned work. Historically, there’s no disputing that Timon undergoes scholars have treated it harshly, contending a startling personality change in the course that some of it was written by others of the play. When we first meet him, he’s (Thomas Middleton is a favourite candidate) WANT a carefree rich man whose compulsive and dismissing it as inferior, both in style LL TO and in substance, to Shakespeare’s great OU’ STA generosity draws friends to him like flies to Y Y honey. But after his lavish spending leaves tragedies. FOR A him deeply in debt and in need of a bailout, Certainly, in conventional terms, the story those same “friends” suddenly prove is lacking: Timon shifts from philanthropy to scarce. Their betrayal causes the naïve misanthropy so profoundly and irretrievably Timon to become bitterly disillusioned. So that the drama has nowhere to go. As TWELFTH NIGHT! bitterly, in fact, that he furiously repudiates immoderate in his hatred as he was in his not just them but all of humankind, retiring liberality, he spends the latter part of the to the woods to live the life of a root- play simply raining curses on anyone and Make The Parlour Inn home base while you take in the Stratford Festival. Full of digging hermit. everyone. It’s as if King Lear had ended charm and character this historic boutique hotel is a local landmark. You’ll love Apparently a real Athenian who lived in with Lear raging on the heath. our modern amenities, delicious menu, outdoor patio and convenient location. the fifth century BCE, Timon was already Such flaws meant that Timon of Athens a legendary misanthrope in classical was largely neglected by the theatre until Experience Stratford and book your stay in one antiquity. Aristophanes mentioned him. the late twentieth century, when a string of our 28 unique guestrooms today! So did Plutarch. Shakespeare may of revelatory productions proved that it have stumbled upon him while reading could be far more compelling on the stage Thomas North’s English translation of than on the page. The great Paul Scofield’s | theparlour.ca 1-877-728-4036 Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, where Timon’s performance as a youthful, vital Timon | 101 Wellington Street Stratford, ON tale is embedded in the biography of Mark at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1965 forced a Antony – Shakespeare’s source for Antony reassessment of the character. Among 4 5 those it inspired was Peter Brook, who This time it boasted an astonishing Timon in Although traditionally categorized as a two men: Apemantus, for all his asperity, launched his seminal Bouffes du Nord Brian Bedford – a performance hailed as a tragedy, Timon of Athens is just as much a sees clearly; Timon is blinded with hatred. theatre in Paris in 1974 with a stunning “landmark” by The New York Times when, lacerating satire – as critics have pointed He refuses Apemantus’s friendship even international production. under the aegis of Tony Randall’s National out, the play anticipates Jonathan Swift’s as he rejects an alliance with Alcibiades, “savage indignation,” certainly in the In Canada, Timon already had a defender Actors Theatre, the show later played who, wronged by the senators of Athens, later scenes where Shakespeare gives in Michael Langham. During his tenure as Broadway to acclaim. (Two other Stratford is preparing to attack the city. Alcibiades Timon a litany of blistering tirades that Artistic Director at the Stratford Festival, legends, Robin Phillips and William Hutt, also (also a historical figure lifted from Plutarch) are entertaining in their mad extremism. Langham staged a 1963 production starring tackled Timon in a much-talked-about but provides the play with its subplot. He, like Connoisseurs of the creative curse will John Colicos, set in the 1920s and ’30s and little-seen production that was part of Phillips’s Timon, has taken his grievance against a find his sweeping denunciation of Athens featuring an original jazz score by Duke financially disastrous 1983–84 season at the group of citizens to the extreme and plans outdoes in all but poetry any of the blights Ellington. Although it divided the critics (who Grand Theatre in London, Ontario.) to bring down all of Athens, but finally is that Lear wishes upon his heartless made to listen to reason and seek a more bridled at the then-novel idea of setting More recently, Stephen Ouimette reiterated daughters. moderate revenge. Shakespeare in the Jazz Age), Langham Timon’s dramatic power when he directed would come back to the play and direct it a 2004 Stratford revival, staged in modern As for poetry and rhetoric, there is Timon’s Timon’s own rage might have proven for Stratford again in 1991. dress and featuring a mighty Peter scathing lecture directed at a gang of cathartic – as perhaps it was to Donaldson. Now, like Langham before him, bandits, in which he finds a model for their Shakespeare, who, it has been suggested, Ouimette is revisiting the play and once larceny in nature itself. (It includes that may have written those tirades to work again unearthing its hidden riches. His wonderful line “The moon’s an arrant thief, out some anger of his own. The tragedy Timon for this production is a particularly sly / And her pale fire she snatches from the is that it doesn’t; Timon’s misanthropy is and apt choice: Joseph Ziegler, the subtle, sun,” which provided the title for Vladimir a dead end that finds solace only in the sympathetic actor known to audiences of Nabokov’s dazzling novel Pale Fire, whose grave.