As the opening of HIRSCH, a play about Canadian theatre legend John Hirsch (1930 – 1989), nears, we continue our series of blog posts featuring a series of Canadian theatre makers talking about the impact the great man had on their career.
How Hirsch’s The Three Sisters Changed My Life
By Stephen Heatley, UBC Department of Theatre and Film
It was a Friday night in the summer of 1976 and two of my best friends and I were travelling from St. Catharines, Ontario to the Stratford Festival for the evening. It was always exciting to make this quintessential Ontario summer pilgrimage to see the work of Canada’s best actors and directors. I was two years out of my undergraduate and everything in the theatre was magic to me. During that same Stratford era, I saw a very quirky and engaging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the whole thing was staged as if it were the dream of Gloriana, Sir Edmund Spencer’s version of Elizabeth I in his epic poem The Faerie Queen. I also saw a mind-blowing version of Measure for Measure which has made me want to direct that play ever since. It was as if director Robin Phillips had unearthed every possible question theatre-goers could have ever asked about this problematic play, and then answered them all so that the whole thing made total emotional sense, something I have never seen since!
But it was the trip to see John Hirsch’s production of The Three Sisters on September 10th that year that would change my theatrical life forever.
I guess for every theatre aficionado there is that one experience that cements their devotion to the live stage forever, and this Friday night was mine. The show was playing at the Stratford second stage, the Avon, which is a 1000 seat proscenium house. My recollection of the set is vague, just that it was very open as opposed to having walls – light and airy, as opposed to oppressive and “Russian”. It was a star-studded cast – William Hutt as Chebutykin, Pat Galloway as Natasha, Alan Scarfe as Andre, Frank Maraden as Soliony, and the sisters were played by the glorious trio of Marti Maraden, Maggie Smith and Martha Henry. What was so vital to me about that experience was that I had been told about Chekhov’s importance as a playwright. I had studied him in “theatre history” and didn’t get it at all. We had done a workshop version of act four of The Cherry Orchard as a performance lab project in 3rd year – still didn’t get it. I had seen The Three Sisters in Toronto in 1973, I had performed in The Seagull in my 4th year at Brock University under the keen direction of Peter Boretski, but it wasn’t until September 10, 1976 that I got it. I really got it. So what happened? Well, we fell in love with those characters that night. When William Hutt threw that clock on the floor in act two, it was as if his whole life and ours were shattering. In act three, when Masha was confessing to her sisters that she was in love with a married man and Olga told her she couldn’t/wouldn’t hear of it and the three sisters cracked up under the pressure of the evening’s events, we all were swept up in their hysterical laughter and we laughed along with them (and cried, more than a little bit). When that first lone leaf drifted from the sky early in act four, followed by another and then another until the whole sky was falling, we wept along with the sky for the loss that the sisters and the town and Vershinin were about to experience. And when the shot that killed Baron Tuzenbach rang out off stage, it was as if it hit each of us in the heart.
Being a recently graduated theatre student who knew everything, I had big opinions about standing ovations. They were to be saved for only the most auspicious of theatre events. As far as I was concerned, audiences stood far too often for things of trifling theatrical value. Not me. Standing was only for the undeniable best! On the night of September 10, (actually, by then, the morning of September 11), I didn’t stop for even a heartbeat to consider whether to stand. It was as automatic as standing for royalty. And I would have stayed all night to know more about these women, their family, the town, that regiment. I’d have stayed for acts five and six and seven had they existed.
I thought I had unequivocally found my muse in John Hirsch. A year or so later, I went to see his production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Toronto Arts Productions expecting to experience the holy grail again. I’ll confess I was a little disappointed that evening. But it just underlined for me that none of us can produce gold every time; that any of us can be inspired directors at times, and at times direct like a workman. But no number of evenings of theatrical disappointment will ever diminish the absolute thrill of Hirsch’s 1976 production of The Three Sisters. Every time I go to the theatre, I know I am searching for the same hit as that night. It was transcendent.
Stephen Heatley
Coordinator of the MFA Directing Program
UBC Department of Theatre and Film
Hirsch is on at the Firehall Arts Centre Feb 25 – Mar 1. Tickets are $15-30 and can be purchased online or by phone (604-689-0926).