《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析魏秀娟

硕士学位论文
《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析
ANALYSIS OF ARTISTIC FEATURES AND TRAGIC

FACTORS OF THE DONNELLYS
魏秀娟
哈尔滨工业大学
2008 年 7 月
国内图书分类号：I106.3
国际图书分类号：82-21
文学硕士学位论文
《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析
硕士研究生：魏秀娟
导师：刘晓丹教授
申请学位：文学硕士
学科、专业：外国语言学及应用语言学
所在单位：外国语学院
答辩日期： 2008 年 7 月 1 日
授予学位单位：哈尔滨工业大学
Classified Index: I106.3
U.D.C.: 82-21
Graduation Thesis for the M. A. Degree
Analysis of Artistic Features and Tragic

Factors of The Donnellys
Candidate: Wei Xiujuan
Supervisor: Prof. Liu Xiaodan
Academic Degree Applied for: Master of Arts
Specialty: Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics
Affiliation: School of Foreign Languages
Date of Oral Defense: July 1, 2008
Degree Conferring Institution : Harbin Institute of Technology

HIT Graduation Thesis for the MA Degree
摘要
加拿大戏剧在初始阶段受到声名狼藉的欧洲殖民主义的限制，后期又在强大
的美国文学的笼罩之下而相形见绌，直到二战之后加拿大戏剧才取得了辉煌的
成就。然而,加拿大戏剧所取得的成就在中国至今未得到文学评论家和读者足够
的重视。
本文选择詹姆斯·里恩尼的《唐纳利一家》进行研究，一是为了填补国内在
里恩尼的戏剧研究上的空白，二是因为该剧是加拿大戏剧史上的一部重要作品，
被一些戏剧评论家称为“加拿大戏剧的一座里程碑”。本文的分析重点是文本和
悲剧因素。文本分析是对戏剧主题和艺术特色的分析，悲剧因素分析则是对历
史和个人两方面的分析。其中对《唐纳利一家》的悲剧因素分析即使是在加拿
大都属首次。
《唐纳利一家》是以对爱尔兰移民唐纳利家的五口人在当地长期争斗中被残
杀这一事件长达八年的调查为基础的。唐纳利一家拒绝屈膝臣服，拒绝离开比
道夫小镇的家。尽管他们面临很多难题，但是他们从不放弃。希望和爱是作品
的主题。在这部三部曲的多种艺术特色当中，纪实剧和舞台隐喻是最重要也是
最耀眼的两个，对此本文着重进行了分析。里恩尼在戏剧创作中结合了多种创
作技巧，形成了他自己独特的戏剧风格 —“里恩尼戏剧”。
历史因素拟从土地，社会和宗教三个角度来分析。白脚族和黑脚族之间土地
的争夺，成群的暴徒的暴力活动，罗马天主教徒和新教徒之间的冲突以及天主
教徒的内讧从历史角度阐释了唐纳利一家被杀害的原因。个人因素的分析则进
一步解释了为什么是唐纳利一家而不是别人成为历史的受害者。
《唐纳利一家》是一部成功的历史悲剧，它成功地把唐纳利一家的民间传奇
搬上了舞台。或许再也没有哪一位加拿大戏剧家或者诗人能够如此成功地把本
土的故事变成世界的，把非文学的纪录片变成神话故事。
关键词加拿大戏剧；里恩尼戏剧；纪实剧；舞台隐喻
Abstract
Though restrained by the infamous European colonialism at the initial stage and
overshadowed by the prodigious American literature in later years, Canadian drama
gained attractive illumination after World War II. However, attention from Chinese
critics and readers has been scarce to its achievements.
This thesis studies James Reaney’s The Donnellys, first for the purpose of filling
in the domestic gap on the study of Reaney’s plays, second for the sake of the play
itself, which is a significant production in Canadian drama history and which has
been hailed by some critics as “a milestone of Canadian drama”. The thesis focuses
on two aspects of the play: text and tragic factors. Text analysis refers to the analysis
of themes and artistic features, and tragic factors are analyzed from historical as well
as individual perspectives. The tragic factors analysis of The Donnellys is the first
analysis from the tragic viewpoint even in Canada.
The Donnellys is based on an eight-year-long research on the brutal massacre of
five Donnellys, members of an Irish immigrant family caught up in a long-standing
local feud. They refuse to bend their knees and leave their home in Biddulph
Township. Though facing many problems, they never give up. Hope and love are
main themes of the trilogy. Among various artistic features of the trilogy,
documentary theatre and stage metaphor are the first two most important and shining
ones, on which the thesis puts its emphasis. Reaney combines kinds of techniques in
his creating, and forms his own special dramaturgical style — “Reaney Play”.
The historical tragic factors are analyzed from three perspectives: land, society
and religion. The land snatch between Whitefeet and Blackfeet, the violence caused
by gangs of mobs, the conflicts between Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as
faction inside the Catholics come together to explain the Donnelly family’s massacre
from one aspect. The analysis of personal factors then makes it clearer why the
Donnellys instead of other families become victims of history.
The Donnellys is a successful history tragedy which stages a local folk legend of
the Donnelly family successfully. Perhaps no other Canadian dramatist or poet has so
successfully transmuted the local into the universal, the stuff of documentary into the
stuff of myth.
Keywords Canadian drama; Reaney play; documentary theatre; stage metaphor

Contents
Chinese Abstract....................................................................................................... I
English Abstract ......................................................................................................II
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One A Brief Introduction of Canadian Drama and James Reaney ...... 3
1.1 A Brief Development History of Canadian Drama............................. 3
1.1.1 Earlier Canadian Drama ............................................................ 3
1.1.2 In the 19th Century: Postcolonial Resistance............................. 4
1.1.3 Modern Canadian Drama .......................................................... 6
1.1.3.1 Theatre after World War I: Nationalism and Naturalism............. 9
1.1.3.2 Theatre after World War II: Center to Periphery ....................... 10
1.2 About James Reaney ........................................................................ 14
1.2.1 James Reaney’s Life ................................................................ 15
1.2.2 James Reaney’ Career.............................................................. 16
Chapter Two James Reaney’s Trilogy The Donnellys ......................................... 20
2.1 Plot Synopsis of the Donnelly plays................................................. 20
2.1.1 Sticks and Stones...................................................................... 21
2.1.2 The St. Nicholas Hotel............................................................. 22
2.1.3 Handcuffs................................................................................. 23
2.2 The Main Themes of The Donnellys ................................................ 24
Chapter Three Main Artistic Features of The Donnellys.................................... 31
3.1 Documentary Theatre ....................................................................... 31
3.1.1 Clear the Ground ..................................................................... 31
3.1.2 Staging the Document in The Donnellys ................................. 33
3.2 Stage Metaphor................................................................................. 38
3.2.1 Classification of Reaney’s Stage Metaphors ........................... 39
3.2.2 Paradox in Reaney’s Stage Metaphors .................................... 42
3.2.3 Three Ruling Stage Metaphors ................................................ 43
3.3 “Reaney Play”: Reaney’s Contribution to Canadian Drama ............ 44
Chapter Four Tragic Factors Analysis of The Donnellys .................................... 48
4.1 Historical Factors — Biddulph Township Feud............................... 48
4.1.1 War of Land ............................................................................. 50
4.1.2 Social Violence........................................................................ 52
4.1.3 Religion and Faction Conflicts................................................ 54
4.2 Personal Factors ............................................................................... 57
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 60
References ............................................................................................................... 64
Chronology of James Reaney ................................................................................ 67
Letters of Statement ............................................................................................... 70
Statement of Copyright .......................................................................................... 70
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. 71
Introduction
Canadian drama, whether in the past or at present, has rarely been an emphasis
in Chinese academia. When people speak of English drama, usually they have in
mind British drama or American drama, or both. There is no doubt that neither
British drama nor American drama can be ignored for their “glorious history and
important position in the world drama with dazing brightness on the world stage”
(Liu Xiaodan 1). However, we cannot ignore Canadian drama — another
time-honored English drama, which has distinctive patterns and characteristics just as
British drama and American drama do. Canadian drama, as a part of world drama,
deserves more attention.
When picking the title “Analysis of Artistic Features and Tragic Factors of The
Donnellys”, the lack of sources is already there in the way. No one in China has
studied James Reaney, though he deserves that. The Donnellys, as his milestone in
plays, shows Reaney’s talent as a playwright. Demanding and reckless as the task is,
it brings ample rewards.
The Donnellys, under the name of Sticks and Stones (1975), The St Nicholas
Hotel (1976) and Handcuffs (1977), is a historical tragedy written by James Reaney,
an important 20th-century Canadian playwright and academy. Reaney has got one
Governor-General’s award for drama and two for poetry (He is a Life Member of the
League of Canadian Poets, and he turns to drama creation only after 1950s). The
trilogy The Donnellys is his landmark in play writing.
This thesis aims to analyze Reaney’s trilogy The Donnellys, and at the same time
give a simple introduction of Canadian drama. To analyze a trilogy in general is too
big a subject for a graduate to handle because every literary work can be analyzed
from many different perspectives. Therefore, this thesis narrows down to analyze the
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trilogy from the angles of artistic features and tragic factors. When speaking of
artistic features, we mainly refer to documentary theatre and stage metaphor. The
tragic factors would be analyzed from two perspectives: historical factors and
personal factors.
As the first thesis on The Donnellys in China, the significance of this study lies
in filling in the domestic gap on the study of Reaney’s plays, and the analysis of the
play itself. The thesis also introduces the playwright and the play, as part of Canadian
drama, to Chinese academy. Through the analysis, this thesis intends to find out
Reaney’s achievements in his Donnelly plays, and also the achievements of the
Donnelly plays themselves.
Besides introduction and conclusion, the thesis has four chapters. Chapter 1 is an
introduction of the history of Canadian drama, which covers its development from
the very beginning to contemporary Canadian English drama, and James Reaney, the
author of The Donnellys. Chapter 2 introduces The Donnellys in detail, the themes of
which are hope and love. Chapter 3 is the analysis of two basic artistic features:
documentary theatre and stage metaphor followed by an overview of Reaney’s
contribution to Canadian drama as a playwright — “Reaney play”. In Chapter 4 the
focus switches to the tragic factors of the trilogy, that is, historical factors and
personal factors.
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Chapter One A Brief Introduction of Canadian Drama and

James Reaney
1.1 A Brief Development History of Canadian Drama 1
Theatrical activity in Canada has a long history. The accepted saying is that
Canadian drama traces back to 1606 when Marc Lescarbot’s Le Theatre de Neptune
en la Nouvelle-France was staged. Canadian drama in English, if not thinking of the
drama-like rituals of the Eskimos, dates back to the eighteenth century and has a
history of more than 200 years. Influenced by European colonialism, Canadian
drama has a long and painful process of growth. On one hand, Canadian drama had
neither its own dramatic tradition, nor acting staff. On the other hand, it had to resist
the powerful effect of American drama and the tradition of European drama and tried
to have its own national style (Wang Yiqun 100).
1.1.1 Earlier Canadian Drama

The earliest Canadian Drama consists of an intermixture of neoclassical forms
with neo-romantic content, professional with amateur practitioners, and English with
French languages (together with occasional pidgin representations of Irish, First
Nations 2 , regional, or working-class dialects). Ric Knowles suggests that Canadian
drama in English has always mixed forms: “From the late sixteenth to the mid-
twentieth century this hybridity has most often involved the use of European
dramaturgical structures to appropriate and contain Canadian — what was then
thought of as ‘native’ — content” (115).
The theatre at this period is labeled by Knowles as “post-contact performances”,
1
Canadian drama in this thesis refers to those written in English
2
“Today North American Indians, the largest community among the Aboriginal peoples, are
known as the First Nation” (Saywell 7).
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which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the variety
show of music and Morris dancing. However, English in content, these performances
were dramaturgical remixes, shaped by what were understood to be the tastes of First
Nations audiences “whom we intended to winne by all faire means possible”
(Basourakos 481). The combination of colonizing intent with hybridity of form is
legible throughout the history of English-Canadian drama.
By the eighteenth century, performances at military garrisons mixed military
personnel with the local bourgeoisie to stage adaptations of European pastoral
dramas or neoclassical tragedies, exercises that exerted control through assimilation,
demonstrated positions of power, and assumed the right to define colonial space that,
because they failed or refused to understand its configuration and use by First
Nation’s peoples, they represented as being empty. There were also closet dramas
(plays written to be read, rather than performed) on First Nation’s subjects based on
European models and authored by military personnel such as Robert Rogers, whose
The Savages of America in 1776 lamented the European destruction of what he called
“Indian” life.
Outside of the garrison, meanwhile, touring productions brought so-called
civilized culture to indigenous peoples while implicitly justifying colonization and
economic exploitation. Most of these productions configured local content
(understood to be wild) as fodder for European forms (assumed to be civilizing),
constructing the New World as raw material for European cultural and economic
production.
1.1.2 In the 19th Century: Postcolonial Resistance

A considerable closet dramaturgy had emerged by the nineteenth century. The
theatre in closet dramaturgy is inherently mixed in genre and depends for its impact
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on intertextual recognition of its European classical models, in which satires

employed familiar plots to the local political figures. This tradition continued into the
century and included such work as the anonymous Measure by Measure, a
Shakespearean parody published in New Brunswick in 1871 (Wu Chizhe 231).
The closet tradition is closely connected with a satiric vein of performed drama.
The tradition can be found in, for example, Thomas Hill’s lost play The Provincial
Association, which was so inflammatory that it caused riots in Saint John in 1845,
and Dolorsolatio(1865), written by Sam Scribble, a good-natured “local political
burlesque”(55) about that time-honored subject, the Canadian constitution, in which
the characters are cities and regions of Canada, plus “two noisy neighbors” (“Mr.
Abe North” and “Mr. Jefferson South”) and “Santa Claus,” but in which there are no
indigenous peoples represented (Scribble 56). The tradition culminated in works,
such as Henry Fuller’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan take-off H.M.S. Parliament (1880), John
E. P. Aldous and Jean Mcllwraith’s Ptarmigan (1895), an operetta about another
time-honored topic, Canadian identity, and Johnny Burke’s The Topsail Geisha, a
1901 Newfoundland adaptation of the British operetta The Geisha, in which the
original “Japanese” chorus become local fishermen fanning themselves with salt cod.
Although firmly linked to metropolitan tradition, many of these satiric plays
acknowledge their own marginalization in ways which can be read as the beginnings
of postcolonial resistance.
By the mid nineteenth century a different closet-drama tradition had evolved,
with aspirations to literary merit. Writers such as Charles Mair, William Wilfred
Campbell, and Charles Heavysege wrote neo-Shakespearean or neo-Romantic verse
dramas with exotic settings ranging from mythical Britain or the biblical Middle East
(Campbell’s Mordred [1895] and Heavysege’s Saul [1857]) to the New World itself
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and its inhabitants (Mair’s Tecumseh [1866]).

Indeed, Mair’s Tecumseh is paradigmatic in its construction of the land as vast,
the wilderness as romantically vanishing, and the landscape, in spite of his subject, as
uninhabited. Not surprisingly, the only well-developed characterization is that of the
white male poet in love with an exoticized embodiment of Nature, the archetypal
Indian Maiden. It is only more than a century later that Kuna-Rappahannock
playwright Monique Mojica’s deconstructs the subject in Princess Pocahontas and
the Blue Spots.
More resistant in its representations of women to dominant constructions of
gender in the nineteenth century, and more theatrical, are the plays of Sarah Anne
Curzon (The Sweet Girl Graduate [1882], Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 [1887])
and Eliza Lanesford Cushing (Esther [1838], The Fatal Ring [1840]). Both writers,
in very different ways, present independent women and their roles in society. They
range from protofeminist social critique in The Sweet Girl Graduate, which probes
contemporary debates about the admission of women to Canadian universities, to the
moralistic representation of heroic intervention in Esther, in which “a humble Jewish
maiden becomes queen of Persia as God’s instrument for saving His people from
destruction”(Wagner 6). Curzon’s Laura Secord locates a more political and secular
model of female heroism within nationalist and imperialist debate, aligning Canadian
“patriotism” with anti-American (and anti-republican) loyalty to Great Britain.
1.1.3 Modern Canadian Drama

In the nineteenth century, Canadian playhouses sprang up in great numbers.
However, these playhouses mainly accommodate American and British touring
companies. After more than a hundred years’ struggle, or exactly until the 1920s and
the 1930s, Canadian drama eventually evolved out of the frustrations of playwrights
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who refused to be mere imitators. It was born of the passion to create their dramatic
art, and Canadian drama began its own way. The Dominion Drama Festival,
established in 1933, was not only a sign of vigor and prosperity of Canadian amateur
dramatic activities, but also a motive of the subsequent professional dramatic cause.
The 1940s and the 1950s saw a turning point of the great progress of Canadian drama,
during which appeared so many outstanding Canadian playwrights, such as John
Coulter, Robertson Davies, Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Herman Voaden and Merrill
benison. All of them began to dramatize their own unique characters, cultures and
backgrounds in plays they created. The first half of the twentieth century, to sum up,
“saw the development of a thriving amateur theatre movement and the best radio
drama on the continent, as well as the emergence of a handful of playwrights of
distinction” (Wasserman 9).
With the awareness of developing its own indigenous plays, Canada still had no
professional theatre companies till 1945. The foremost theatre critic in the country
even could say, “There is not in Canada a single person who earns a living as a
playwright, or who has any practical hope of doing so” (Cohen 1959:28). In 1965,
Michael Tait concluded his survey of “the grey wastes of Canadian drama” from
1920 to 1960 by noting “the most depressing feature of theatre in Canada: the lack of
any vital and continuing relation between theatrical activity and the work of the
Canadian playwright” (Tait 1976: 65). And even such voice like “the role of
Canadian plays or playwrights could be omitted” (Huebert 34) was in existence at
that time.
Exactly speaking, Canadian drama as an indigenous professional institution goes
back only as far as the end of World War II. English Canadian drama, as part of
Canadian Drama, develops more lately than Quebec drama. The key year for English
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drama in Canada is 1967, the Centennial Year, the year of Exposition and of the only
all-Canadian Dominion Drama Festival, and also the year from which
English-Canadian drama achieved legitimacy (Guo Jide 1992:103). On the 100
anniversary of Canada, three great plays created separately by three playwright —
Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga
and Colours in the Dark by James Reaney, the protagonist of this thesis, were
performed on the festival though all the major awards came to Robert Gurik’s Le
Pendu, a play from the mature Quebec theatre. However what is more important is
that audiences and critics around all Canada buoyed by a new national
self-consciousness and pride: plays written by Canadian playwrights, performed by
Canadian actors in Canadian theatre were good and became a new cultural
phenomenon. Even in New York, Toronto’s playwrights found their place. At this
period Robertson Davis and James Reaney became well-known and respected for
their plays highlighted English-Canadian theatre from the late 1940s through the
mid-sixties.
The Centennial Year is the revolutionary year of Canadian drama. From then on
English-Canadian drama enters a new era. More and more new playwrights
contribute lots of brilliant plays. The playwrights in the 1970s mainly created in
traditional realistic styles and the themes focused on Canadian people and history
and society. Just as Jerry Wasserman said in the instruction part of Modern Canadian
Plays:
These events and the subsequent explosion of Canadian drama over the
next decade seem in retrospect products of a particular historical moment,
like the new European theatre that appeared in the 1870s, the new
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American theatre of the 1920s and the British theatrical renaissance of

the mid-1950s. Yet all these movements were culminations of social and
cultural forces that had been gathering momentum for many years. In the
case of Canadian theatre the revolution of 1967 was rooted in an
evolutionary process that began to take shape clearly around the time of
the First World War. (9)
1.1.3.1 Theatre after World War I: Nationalism and Naturalism

The twentieth century arrived in Canada theatrically with World War I and the
“Little Theatre” movement that was both nationalist and naturalistic (modeled after
Dublin’s Abbey Theatre), and proto-modernist (following the European avant-garde)
was prevailing. Small theatres, where local arts groups used to perform new,
occasionally Canadian work, were very successful in the period, which also avoid
touring productions from the United States and Britain (Guo Jide 1990:79). The
productions performed in small theatres range from the light rural comedy of Merrill
Denison’s Brothers in Arms (1921), together with his deterministically naturalistic
Marsh Hay (1923), to Lois Reynolds Kerr’s social satires Among Those Present
(1933) and Nellie McNabb (1934).
The paradigmatic Little Theatre was Toronto’s Hart House, under Roy Mitchell.
One of the most significant plays, which transferred to Hart House from Montreal,
was Marjorie Pickthall’s The Woodcarver’s Wife (1920), “a romantic melodrama
with modernist and protofeminist overtones, in which the wife and model of a
woodcarver discovers the deep-seated sorrow of her role as mixed-race Pieta in her
husband’s work through a sexual relationship with an ‘Indian lover’” (Conolly 91).
Herman Voaden, whose plays were steeped in abstract theatricality, choreographed
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movement, music, and the interplay of light and shadow, saw the harsh beauty of the
northern landscape. Like that of his contemporary, painter Lawren Harris, Voaden’s
North, as empty canvas, had no room for the material realities of Native life.
Voaden’s most characteristic contribution to Canadian dramaturgy may be Symphony,
“A Drama of Motion and Light for a New Theatre” (Voaden 37).
1.1.3.2 Theatre after World War II: Center to Periphery
After World War II, the professional theatre was set up for the purpose of
activating Canadian plays. However, this did not benefit Canadian plays immediately
since it intended to seek a Canadian way of performance the classics. Thus the
Manitoba Theatre Centre founded in 1958, which was the prototype for a series of
“branch-plant” regional theatres that became the visible manifestation of the
center-to-periphery philosophy, based on the British model of disseminating
cosmopolitan high culture to the culturally impoverished provinces, aimed to build
“a distinctive style of Canadian theatre” (Guthrie 28). Stratford, the Regionals, and
smaller companies founded in the period largely neglected Canadian work, though
Sydney Risk’s Everyman Theatre in Vancouver and Dora Mavor Moore’s New Play
Society in Toronto were exceptions, producing such work as Elsie Park Gowan’s The
Last Caveman in 1938, and the plays of Morley Callaghan, Lister Sinclair, and John
Coulter throughout the 1940s and 50s. The Irish Canadian Coulter’s best-known
work Riel (1950) attempted to invent a national mythology.
Perhaps the most significant development in the 1950s was the foundation of
Toronto Workshop Productions. Luscombe created a hybrid documentary form that
blended elements from circus and minstrelsy with mime, music, and team sports to
address issues of class, revolutionary politics, and race, all of which can be seen in
Mr. Bones (1969), Chicago ’70 (1970), Ten Lost Years (1974), and Ain’t Lookin’
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(1980). Luscombe’s work proved prescient, as many dominant strands of the

alternative theatre movement in the late 1960s and 70s employed collective
techniques in localist and/or politicized documentary theatres. This included the
collaborative poetic plays of James Reaney with his director, Keith Turnbull, which
documented place and history in Southwestern Ontario, and culminated in his epic
trilogy The Donnellys (1974–7), a monumental achievement that mixed documentary
with myth, classical archetypes with local history. Reaney’s 1977 adaptation of John
Richardson’s Wacousta was developed through a series of workshops that included
the then-unknown Tomson Highway as a Cree language coach, together with the
now well-known First Nations actors Gary Farmer and Graham Green. The
production modeled a blend of western and indigenous practices and performative
traditions that continue to resonate, particularly in the work of Highway himself.
The tradition of collective documentary and the search for hybrid Canadian
dramaturgies continued into the 1980s and 90s in productions such as This Is for You,
Anna (1985), a mixture of documentary, fairytale, and personal narrative, which took
its foundational place in Canadian feminist theatre. Hollingsworth employed a
mélange of filmic visual styles to tell the multiple histories of the peoples of Canada
in ways that deconstruct the country’s founding myths.
However, not all the theatre is considered to be alternative. Much of that work
was alternative only by virtue of a focus on social issues and a counter hegemonic
nationalism or regionalism — a construction of “alternative” Canadian or regionalist
hegemonies in the face of those of the colonial center, which nevertheless produced
their own exclusions. Foundational plays such as George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita
Joe (1967), David Freeman’s Creeps (1971) defined a dominant literary tradition,
rooted in naturalism that continues into the present in the plays of John Murrell. Even
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at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, with which the tradition is most closely identified,
such work has blended stylized formal influences with naturalistic dialogue and
characterization to incorporate.
The most celebrated playwrights to emerge from the Tarragon tradition of poetic
naturalism nurtured under artistic directors Bill Glassco (1971–82) and the late Urjo
Kareda (1982–2002) are Judith Thompson and Jason Sherman.
Since her first play The Crackwalker, Thompson has pushed the limits of
naturalism in darkly disturbing ways. White Biting Dog (1984), I AmYours (1987),
and Lion in the Streets (1990) blend naturalistic conceptions of character with
extreme, often contradictory action and situation to push audiences to “the other side
of the dark”(Thompson 12). In 1997 she attempted in Sled to capture, within one of
her most brutal plots, both the rich multi-ethnic history and contemporary
constitution of Toronto, as well as a northern, nationalist transcendence with roots in
both First Nations mythology and the metaphysical theosophy of Voaden and his
contemporaries. Since then Thompson has consolidated a less disruptive naturalistic
style in Perfect Pie (2000) and Habitat, which premiered at Canadian Stage in 2001.
Sherman’s work, like Thompson’s, is deeply ethical. It is also rooted in
naturalism, and like Thompson’s exhibits a flawless ear for dialogue and the poetic
rhythms of quotidian speech. Sherman’s work, however, is more overtly political
than Thompson’s, and his hybridities are less emotionally raw, mediated as they are
by his wit and intellect. Sherman is also the only major Canadian playwright who
deals with what it means to be Jewish in the contemporary western world. The
hybridities of Jewish identities in Canada also inform his struggles with what it
means, in personal, political, and historical terms, to be Canadian and to be a writer.
Existing against these language- and character-based dramaturgies since the late
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1960s has been the more self-consciously avant-garde works of playwrights such as
Beverly Simons, Hrant Alianak, Michael Springate, Margaret Hollingsworth,
Lawrence Jeffrey, and the prolific Morris Panych, together with companies such as
Savage God in Vancouver, the early Factory Theatre Lab and Toronto Free Theatre
in Toronto, PRIMUS Theatre in Winnipeg, and One Yellow Rabbit in Calgary. With
the exception of the work of Hollingsworth, which interrogates the modernist
aesthetic from a feminist perspective, most of these plays share the tendencies of
high-modernist formalism to contain anxieties and assimilate threatening otherness
based on gender, culture, or social situation within tightly controlled and
self-contained dramaturgical enclosures.
The oeuvre of George F.Walker, Canada’s most prolific playwright, is difficult
to characterize. He first emerged as a modernist, writing homages to Beckett and the
Theatre of the Absurd in his earliest works, but he soon modulated into dramatic
revisionings in exotic settings rooted in B-movie and film noir conventions. This
period in Walker’s work culminated in his first major success, Zastrozzi (1977), a
darkly ironic play about a master criminal who sets out to rid the world of sloppy
thinking, after which he embarked on a detective trilogy, The Power Plays (1983).
In 1983, Walker turned for the first time to his own backyard and came up with
Criminals in Love. These plays betray an increasing naturalism, an increasing interest
in societally marginalized characters, and an increasingly direct concern with social
issues. But Walker’s most widely produced incursion into large theatres across the
continent and beyond, also written during this period, was his only adaptation of a
classic. Nothing Sacred (1988), based on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, is an
anti-Oedipal play structured around rebellions against the Law of the Father and
linking questions of biological reproduction (fathering) with critiques of capitalist
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reproduction (surplus value), and the reproduction of the patriarchal order.

Walker’s most recent play, Heaven, mounted at Canadian Stage in Toronto in
2000 and set in the inner city for the first time, pushes his earlier work’s critique of a
brutal social system to expressionist extremes, including farcical scenes in a fanciful
1940s heaven.
In the last years of the twentieth century, Canada also saw the powerful
influence of European clowning, mime, and movement-based theatre on its theatre
companies, many of which have produced plays in mixed genres, including works
such as Martha Ross’s The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine (1989), Karen Hines’s
Pochsy’s Lips (1992), and Martha Ross’s The Attic, the Pearls & Three Fine Girls
(1999).
As we see, modern Canadian drama has already broken loose the shackle of
English and American drama. The Canadian playwrights create more and more
indigenous plays, showing Canada’s multi-culture. The number of produced
Canadian plays and playwrights grew significantly during the final decades of the 20th
century, with several factors contributing to this dynamic as we have explained above.
Increased recognition and support for the development of new Canadian drama were
forthcoming from major regional theatres, and dramaturgy-based playwright
associations were formed across the country. There emerged a generally heightened
preoccupation with the exploration of multiple and hybridized national identities
through drama.
1.2 About James Reaney

When it comes to James Reaney as a dramatist, many people feel him fresh or
strange since he is a poet turned playwright, and no scholar in China has studied his
plays till now. To better understand him and his plays, a brief account of his life and
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career background has to be made so that we can clearly identify what elements have
great effects on his turn from a poet to a playwright, his artistic styles and
characteristics of his playwriting.
1.2.1 James Reaney’s Life

James Crerar Reaney has many identities: poet, playwright, children’s writer,
English professor, and literary critic. He was born in a rural community named South
Easthope near Stratford, Ontario, on September 1, 1926. He had his elementary
education at the country schoolhouse, Elmhurst School, and then attended high
school in Stratford. He enrolled in the University of Toronto in 1944. He completed a
master’s degree in English in 1949 at the University of Toronto and began teaching
that year in the department of English at the University of Manitoba. His years in
Manitoba were the only time when he has lived outside Ontario. He left University of
Manitoba during 1956-58 and returned to University of Toronto in order to complete
his doctoral degree. His dissertation “The Influence of Spenser on Yeats” (1958) was
supervised by Professor Northrop Frye, whose works on literary criticism,
symbolism and the structure of romance remained important influences on Reaney’s
teaching and writing. From 1950 to 1960, he taught at the University of Manitoba,
and then moved with his family to London, Ontario. Reaney taught in the
Department of English at the University of Western Ontario since 1960 and now
retired.
James Reaney married with Colleen Thibaudeau, also a distinguished Canadian
poet, in 1951. They have one son (one deceased) also named James Reaney who
works as a journalist, and a daughter, Susan, who works as a documentary editor.
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1.2.2 James Reaney’ Career

Reaney is well established as a poet, playwright, and academician. As a poet,
Reaney has outstanding achievements. His first book of poetry, The Red Heart
(1949), won the Governor-General’s award and made him prominent at twenty-three.
After receiving his Ph. D in 1958, he published his second book of poetry A Suit of
Nettles (1958), for which he won his second Governor-General’s award for poetry.
When the recipient of two Governor-General’s awards for books of outstanding
poetry was well on the way to a solid career as a major Canadian poet, Reaney turned
suddenly to drama in 1960. In that year, he moved from Winnipeg, where he had
been teaching English at the University of Manitoba, to London, Ontatio, to join
Western’s English department. From then on, he found his true métier, and today his
position as dramatist overshadows that of poet.
As a playwright, Reaney also shows his outstanding talents. Anthony said in
Stage Voices (1978), “James Reaney is a major Canadian poet turned playwright who
has introduced a new kind of theatre into Canada”(140). In the shift of emphasis
from poetry to the public and communal form of drama, he followed up The Killdeer
(1962) with Colours in the Dark (1969), Listen to the Wind (1972), Masks of
Childhood (1972) and plays for children. Juvenile fiction included The Boy with an R
in his Hand (1965) and Take the Big Picture. In such plays as Wacousta (1979), King
Whistle (1980) and his landmark trilogy The Donnellys, comprised of Sticks and
Stones (1975), The St Nicholas Hotel (1976) and Handcuffs (1977), Reaney has
combined archival research, poetry, elements of romance and melodrama, mime and
myth to tell the central stories and legends of Ontario. Other dramatic works include
Alice through the Looking Glass (1994), staged at Stratford in 2004 and 2006, and
Scripts: Librettos for Operas and other Musical Works (2004), edited by John
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Beckwith.
Reaney’s plays mainly consist of children’s play and historical play. Some of his
best works are represented by his 1960s plays for children — Names and Nicknames,
Geography Match, and Ignoramus. His best historical play is what we choose in the
study for the thesis —The Donnellys.
The early plays show Reaney’s struggling to master the elements of the
dramatist’s craft, a struggle that is not always successful. The Killdeer reveals typical
weaknesses of Reaney’s work at that time. There is a sensational and melodramatic
plot in which a female prisoner accused of murder is made pregnant by the
protagonist to save her from the gallows, with Madame Fay unmasked in a final
courtroom scene, all of which is accompanied by crude characterization and
uncertain motivation. However, if the other plays of that period — The Easter Egg,
The Sun and the Moon, Listen to the Wind, and Three Desks — reveal similar
weaknesses, they are also plays rich in poetry, and they feature a nonrealistic
approach to theater that relies on nonlinear plots and the representation of mythic
patterns through theatrical effects. If the reader or viewer is disconcerted by these
early plays, it is because there are so many unexpected and unprepared shifts in
Reaney’s dramatic voice.
Colours in the Dark commissioned by the Stratford Festival and produced by
John Hirsch at the Avon Theatre in Stratford in 1967, is the best of these and it also
appeals to adult audiences. The play dispenses almost entirely with plot, motivation,
and conventional structure, replacing them with elements related to the play’s
thematic concerns — the letters of the alphabet, the books of the Bible, and the
seasons. “The play’s key structural element, which gives coherence to the multiple
incidents and to the rapid switches in mood, is provided by poems that Reaney had
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already published and that are themselves given coherence by the dominant
“Existence” poems” (Cohen 1960:36). Central to these elements or motifs is the
archetypal theme of a fall and possible redemption.
Many critics regard Reaney’s Donnelly trilogy, produced between 1973 and
1975 by Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, as his best work. His re-creation of the events
surrounding the 1880 murder of the Donnelly family of southwestern Ontario
combines in a striking way history, folktales, myth, music, dancing, mime, and an
inventive use of props.
The first part, Sticks and Stones, is a vivid celebration of the Donnelly family
and a powerful foreshadowing of their deaths. While rooted in naturalistic detail, the
play suggests that the Donnellys are outsiders, as mythic in stature as Oedipus or the
ancient mariner. The other two plays of the trilogy — The St. Nicholas Hotel and
Handcuffs — are less effective, for they repeat the essential story of the murder of
the Donnellys. In the trilogy the mythic gives way to the naturalistic, and drama is
too often subsumed in literal documentary. However if the trilogy is marred by
Reaney’s excesses and if the published text seems confusing (nine actors must carry
more than seventy roles), the true values of the work can best be seen in production,
where the complex nexus of symbols and the larger-than-life characters carry
dramatic conviction. Reaney’s plays are best understood as process rather than in
terms of the printed text.
Following the Donnelly trilogy Reaney turned to dramatizing Canadian
historical themes, as in Baldoon (with C. H. Gervais), The Dismissal, Wacousta!, and
The Canadian Brothers, the last two of which were based on melodramatic novels by
Major John Richardson, a deservedly neglected early 19th-century writer.
The late plays have not been well received. In such 1980s plays as King Whistle!
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and Antler River, Reaney further reduced the scope of his themes by dramatizing
incidents in the history of his own immediate neighborhood of Stratford and London,
Ontario. These plays have not gained provincial or national attention.
Reaney has also written a number of libretti: The Shivaree: Opera in Two Acts
(1978) and Crazy to Kill (1988), both with music by John Beckwith, and Serinette
(1990), with music by Harry Somers. His adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice through
the Looking-Glass (1994) premiered at the Stratford Festival, Canada, in 1994. A
retrospective volume of 11 short stories, The Box Social, was published in 1996.
Reaney is held in high position as a dramatist, though his work is uneven,
revealing a conflict between his multiple identities as poet, playwright, children’s
writer, English professor, and literary critic. Naturally, Reaney’s plays have all poet
gifts and they depend on the music of the spoken word, the imaginative and spiritual
response to atmosphere, mood, tone, and theme. Thus Reaney’s plays have formed
distinguished styles and are highly valued by the audience and critics. In fact, he has
been the subject of several critical biographies and a television documentary. Now he
lives in London, Ontario, where “Reaney Days” events are occasionally staged in his
honor.
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Chapter Two James Reaney’s Trilogy The Donnellys

The Donnellys is James Reaney’s first success in drama after his great success of
Colours in the Dark at Stratford’s Avon theatre in 1967. One might expect that he
would write in a steady stream of dramatic work like his first several plays. However,
Reaney was engrossed in the fascinating tale of the works of the Donnellys of Lucan,
Ontario. He decided to shape their incredible story into dramatic form. He began the
research work on the play and hoped to collaborate with John Hirsch on its
production. In 1969, their planned collaboration was dropped since Hirsch left
Stratford, but Reaney continued his research and completed a long first draft of the
play in 1972. Then he realized that there was too much background information for a
single play, so he rewrote it into the now version of trilogy. The Donnellys, including
Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs, tells the historical story of
a family who immigrated from Ireland to Canada in 1844, and who were murdered
by a vigilante committee of their neighbors in the township of Biddulph, Ontario, in
1880. The Donnelly trilogy is the result of Reaney’s extended research project on the
the family and their fate, and the Donnellys are created as heroes in the trilogy
according to Reaney’s perception.
2.1 Plot Synopsis of the Donnelly plays

Stick and Stones, covers the Donnelly family’s first immigrant life in Lucan,
Ontario during the period of 1857-67. Reaney shows us “the Donnellys’ stubborn
refusal to bend to Whitefeet pressures in Ireland” (Lee 1969:37). They struggle to
make a place for themselves in Biddulph. However, their new neighbors are mostly
Irish Catholic immigrants, who attach a label of “Blackfeet” (Irishmen from
Tipperary, or their descendants, who would not join in the activities of the Whitefeet
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against the English landlords) to the Donnellys. This makes them uncomfortable.
The St. Nicholas Hotel, the second play in the trilogy, traces the lives of Michael and
William Donnelly and their brothers, the indomitable spirits of the clan. They
continue to provoke the wrath of their numerous enemies in Biddulph Township,
many of whom have risen to positions of authority in the community. “Michael and
William Donnelly take us on a theatrical road trip, through love affairs, bar-room
brawls, late-night pacts and early-morning adventures” (Souchotte 21). The final
play in the group, Handcuffs, deals with the Donnelly massacre and the travesty of
justice that led to the acquittal of the killers despite the testimony of an eyewitness.
2.1.1 Sticks and Stones

Mr. and Mrs. Donnelly have emigrated with their children from the poverty and
sectarian violence of Ireland after refusing to bow to the threats of the Whitefeet, a
secret society of militant anti-Protestants. The family settles on 100 acres of
un-cleared land in Biddulph Township in southwestern Ontario along the so-called
“Roman Line”, a road of farms belonging to Roman Catholic families like their own.
They rent the land from absentee landlord John Grace on the understanding that they
will have first right to purchase it later at a fair price. Their growing family
eventually totals seven sons and one daughter.
After they’ve spent years improving the land, however, landlord Grace ignores
their previous agreement and sells half of it to another family, newly arrived from
Ireland. Understandably, James Donnelly reacts with fury, refusing to surrender the
land he has worked so hard to clear. A relative of the newcomers, Patrick Farrell,
challenges the Donnellys’ right to the land and tries to demolish their home, backing
off only when James shoots him in the arm. A court decision decrees that James can
keep the northern fifty acres of his land but has to give up the southern half.
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The two men, now bitter enemies, later come to blows in full view of their
neighbors at a logging bee where Patrick Farrell is killed. Donnelly is convicted of
his murder and sentenced to hang by a corrupt magistrate who now holds the
mortgage on his land. Mrs. Donnelly, pregnant with the couple’s eighth child, walks
40 miles to Goderich and successfully petitions the Governor General to commute
her husband’s sentence to seven years’ imprisonment.
As Mr. Donnelly serves his time, his wife struggles to raise her family alone, and
conflicts with neighbors continue, underscored by sinister echoes of Whitefeet
violence. Even when their barn is burned down, the Donnellys refuse to be driven out
— a resolve that leads inexorably to a tragic conclusion.
2.1.2 The St. Nicholas Hotel

Will Donnelly, the cripple, becomes a driver for Hugh Mcphee’s stagecoach
company, one of the three companies on the London-Exeter line. After a few years
he buys the company and operates the stage by himself. During this period, Will and
a girl named Maggie Donovan fall in love with each other. However, Mr. Donovan
would never have a Donnelly as his son-in-law. He prevents Maggie from Will and
marries her to another man he chooses. Will later marries Nora McDonald and
moves to a farm three miles away at Whalen’s Corners in Usborne Township.
Will and Mike, under the name of “Blackfeet”, never lose their indomitable
spirit of the clan and continue to provoke the wrath of their numerous enemies in
Biddulph Township, many of whom have risen to positions of authority in the
community. Will and Mike smash most of the tollgates that their enemies build for
them. However, their success makes their enemies build stronger barriers to them.
For example, the Vigilance Committee is formed to build a case against the
Donnellys and put all the Donnelly boys except Bob and Mike in jails for several
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months. The elder brother, James, dies of inflammation and it is the first Donnelly
son who passes away.
After the death of James the junior, the sixth son Bob is sentenced two years in
prison for a grievous fight with whiteboys. Mike, who works for the Canada south
railway and lives in Lucan with his wife Nellie Heins, is stabbed to death in a
bar-room of the Royal Hotel in Exeter by William Lewis, the barman.
At this time, Ireland is still in famine and Bridget Donnelly, the niece of Mr.
Donnelly, comes from hometown to live with the family.
2.1.3 Handcuffs
The Donnellys are treated as plague and no people would like to neighbor them
any more. Tom Donnelly is even refused to drink his horse by Mrs. Glass from her
tavern. Doctor Jerome is forbidden to cure the Donnelly’s sick. For Mike’s funeral,
only the O’Connor family helps them. Timothy Corcoran, who is also an Ireland
Catholic like the Donnellys, loses in his election for the member of the Parliament by
seven votes of the Donnelly family. Their conflicts with the community become
acute. The Donnellys are so hated that even their only left friends are persuaded to
fight against them.
One night the barns and stables of Patrick Marksey are burned down and he
accuses the Donnellys of the accident. At that time, Mrs. Donnelly is visiting her
daughter Jenny who lives at St. Thomas. The Warrants are issued to arrest Mr. and
Mrs. Donnelly. Before the trial for the fire business, a mob of about forty members
led by James Carroll enters Donnelly home, kill and mutilate James, Johannah, as
well as Tom and Bridget Donnelly, and then they burn them and the house. Then the
mob arrives at Will’s home and kills his bother John who goes to Will’s to fetch the
cutter for their journey, thinking he is Will.
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The trial of the six men who committed the massacre is opened at London.
Though it is obvious a massacre, the jury cannot give a judgment on the six
murderers. Therefore, a new trial is opened, which, however, gives its verdict: “not
guilty of murder”.
2.2 The Main Themes of The Donnellys

Reaney mainly created two kinds of plays: children plays and historical plays.
The theme of childhood and growth to maturity within the family can be constantly
found in James Reaney’s children plays. One can read Reaney’s mind easily:
children search for truth; children are the future of the world; children are the hope of
the future; children are innocent; children are the parents of adults. The Donnellys
shares something in common — hope and love — with other Reaney plays, both
children play and historical play.
It is true that the Donnellys struggle hard to survive in the feud and fail at last
with a wholesale murder by the Whitefeet, but still “the Donnellys will continue to
people the earth” (Anthony 142). Therefore, in this historical tragedy, Reaney still
focuses on hope together with the family love, the traditional theme of his plays.
Before talking about themes, it is helpful to think the following three questions:
(1) How can factors in human nature and in society transform certain members of a
community into tragic scapegoats? (2) How can conflicts begun in their country of
origin poison an immigrant family’s chance for happiness in their adopted country?
(3) How can sensationalism distort our view of guilt and innocence? The main
themes of the play lie in the answers below.
It is difficult to find an easy way to explain how factors in human nature and in
society can transform the Donnellys into tragic scapegoats. It is also hard to define
the factors that affect or results in the Donnellys’ deaths in a simple sentence, though
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obviously it is not only the result of that flagitious massacre by the Whitefeet. There
are many more complicated reasons to decide what kind life one would live, for
example, the society system, the president who governs the country, beliefs, what
kind of family one is raised in, the community culture, the personal characters and so
on.
The Donnellys are both sticks and stones, but they are compared to stones more
for they are like stones more. Rigid, stubborn, never hiding their differences as
Blackfeet, the Donnellys with edges and corners clearly demarcated, show the
Biddulph community their power as a family and drive their enemies to build
stronger and stronger barriers for them, until at last, five of them are suddenly and
brutally murdered and burned at night.
The violence destroys the stubborn Donnelly stones also with the help from the
whole community. The Catholic Church, which the Donnellys belong to, stands on
the Whitefeet side and the priest refuses to listen to John Donnelly’s confession. The
whole family fail in the confirmation, a Catholic sacrament of mature Christian
commitment and a deepening of baptismal gifts (Like Baptism and Eucharist, it is a
Sacrament of Initiation for Catholics and a Sacrament of faith in God’s fidelity to us).
In Jenny’s word, her family is “refused by the church called the Roman Line, or a
bigger church than that for it involved Protestants too” (Sticks and Stones 84).
The Donnellys are excluded by Whitefeet of the Catholics for their refusal to
join them and their vote for the Protestants candidate as senator. The Donnellys also
have some relationship with Protestants and they are friends in some way, but the
Protestants don’t take them as people on their side. At last, Tom’s brother-like friend
Jim betrays him and sells the whole family for five hundred dollars. Lord Palmerston,
the premier of England in 18th century, once said, “A nation has no permanent
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enemies and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.” It is interests that

cause the death of the family.
When first settling in Biddulph, the Donnellys have conflicts with the Fat Lady’s
family on the ownership of those 100 acres of land. Mr. Donnelly and Patrick Farl,
the Fat lady’s brother, are in fight also because of their previous conflicts in the battle
of two families. Therefore, it is these factors jointly that cause the massacre of the
family.
Then how can conflicts begun in their country of origin poison an immigrant
family’s chance for happiness in their adopted country?
The Donnellys are Blackfeet who immigrate to Canada for free life away from
Whitefeet violence. However, the new land they live on is also full of Whitefeet from
Tipperary, who form a secret society to continue the violent activities against all
except themselves. When in the old country, the Donnelly family was forced to join
Whitefeet. In the new land, they still refuse to join that “church” though facing many
problems caused by their choice. It is not easy to be Blackfeet while most of their
neighbors are Whitefeet.
The Whitefeet form a faction, a secret society, which belongs to the Roman
Catholics. They hate the Protestant English landlords who are regarded as tyrants,
robbers and murderers that rob the people of their little spots and turn them out to
hell. They ride around at night dressed up like ladies (so they could not be
recognized) to “punish the bloody robbers” (Sticks and Stones 16). They make it hot
for landlords as well as Blackfeet. There is a family in Tipperary named Sheas who
rent a good farm from English landlords in the hard times, and who refuse to give up
their land and say no to the Whitefeet, are burned alive in their beds at night by their
also poor Whitefeet compatriots.
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The Donnellys do not want to join the secret society to do the same terrible
things to their neighbors, thus they escape from their Whitefeet compatriots.
However, when the son Will tells Mrs. Donnelly he is called “Blackfoot,” she
realizes that “across the sea even it would come following us” (Sticks and Stones 15).
The family is clear about what they will confront with choosing to be a Blackfoot
while most the neighbors are Whitefeet, but they still persevere in their decision just
as Mrs. Donnelly says:
Terrible and filthy as the name of Blackfoot is—worse than scab, or

leper or nigger or heretic have they made it, they, the clean, just and
secret people—I’d rather be called scab, or leper or nigger or heretic or
Blackfoot than do what they did to the Sheas. (Sticks and Stones 17)
Mr. Donnelly outfaces the Whitefeet in the old country and continues to outface
them in Canada, the adopted country. Saying no to Whitefeet equals to have dealings
with the Protestant for the secret society. The Donnellys are cursed by the Whitefeet,
and they have to smash all the tollgates set up by them on their road of the race.
They have to pay more for the pursuit of happiness. With the father in prison for
seven years, the mother needs more support from the Donnelly boys. They work hard
to help the family; they fight those back who ride roughshod over them; they bear the
name that prevents them from normal entertainment with most boys and girls in the
town, for most of them are their enemies; the Donnelly children are not the right
sons-in-law or daughter-in-law for families with “good reputation” and are kept away
from their beloved ones, and that is why the innocent girl Jenny has to marry off to
some place far from Biddulph.
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What the children of poor family have to get over is the lack of good food,
beautiful clothes or the chance for better education. What the children born in bad
reputation families faces is the insult from other children or adults. The Donnelly
children suffer all since they are poor and they are Blackfeet at the same time.
The parents also bear much for the name of Blackfeet. Mr. Donnelly is
sentenced seven years in prison for his killing of a Whitefoot. If he does not give
himself up, or his wife does not write three petitions to the chief constable begging
for leniency, he would be sentenced death. Years later, a Whitefoot is sentenced only
two years for killing a Blackfoot, Mike Donnelly, without any intervention from
upper government. All the unfair treatments on the Donnelly family lead them to a
tragic fate.
It is beyond dispute that sensationalism can distort our view of guilt and
innocence. The Donnellys are not bad persons but they face the whole community’s
disputation and repulsion. The reason is sensationalism. When most people are
against some things or some people, the few ones who are not will at least keep away
from them if not go to the opposite side. Take the fight between Mr. Donnelly and
Patrick Farl for example, the crowded people all know that it is Farl starts the fight;
however, they make such words for inquest: “Did not see Farrell take up a handspike
at all, thinks it Donnelly’s intention to pick a quarrel with someone when he came to
bee more than to help to do anything” (Sticks and Stones 49).
Some innocent people would follow others when the latter is a large group to
avoid him or her becoming a different person. If 99 persons use toothpastes of brand
A and said those toothpaste of other brands are in bad quality, probably the left one
will also use brand A if he or she doesn’t do a research on all the toothpastes. This is
the sensationalism that causes the Donnellys’ hard weather.
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Through the analysis of the three questions, we find nothing about hope but
totally tragedy. The Donnellys strive for surviving, but fail, and at last are murdered
with their bad names left. Even today, when the mother wants to stop her child from
doing some bad things, she frightens him with the Donnellys. There are also many
versions of the Donnelly story emphasize the supposed ruthlessness of the clan,
making them out to be little more than criminals who essentially got what they
deserved from the neighbors they’d victimized for decades.
Reaney writes The Donnellys based on his historical research documents,
including documents in the attics of two local courthouses, and, much as Miller had
done, set out to correct what he saw as misleading and melodramatic accounts of the
story. A scene in Sticks & Stones, depicting a traveling medicine show’s performance
of a melodrama about the “black” Donnellys, satirizes Kelley’s book. Reaney also
dedicates the published version of the trilogy as follows:
In memory of Alfred Scott Garrett (1905-1964), the first historian of

Biddulph Township to realize that both the Vigilantes who murdered
them and Thomas Kelley who murdered them again in his book The
Black Donnellys, a name they were never called during their lifetimes,
had totally misportrayed Mr. and Mrs. James Donnelly. (Ross 6)
Reaney aims to give a fair judgment on the murdered family almost 100 years later,
to bring the living Donnellys some comfort and to peace the dead’s soul. Just as we
mention before, “the Donnellys will continue to people the earth” (Anthony 142).
Though the price the Donnellys paid is too high, they finally survive from what they
escape from as they hoped to.
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Having suffered so much that we mentioned above, the family is still a united
family. Wife supports husband; sons and daughter help each other; mother loves and
protects children from being hurt as Blackfeet; father never hesitates to refuse to join
the violent activities and tries his best to fight for his family. This is a family where
its members love or be loved, where they treat as the refuge that keeping them from
the secret society. Therefore every member of the Donnelly family unites together to
protect their family, and to face the difficulties on their way to happy life
Though they have not got enough money to buy that 100 acres of land from the
landlord, yet Will still can get a fiddle as a birthday present. Though Mr. Donnelly is
sentenced seven years in prison, the children never feel ashamed having a guilty
father. Though the children are young, they are far from effeminacy and work hard in
the field as his father’s labor. With husband in prison and a baby in womb and no
money, the unlettered mother still insist her children going to school to be educated
for their future.
Escaping from old country for better life, the Donnellys try their best to survive
in the feud though murdered at last. Their fate is a tragedy and the whole story is a
gothic myth, but readers and audiences always see hope out of crucifixions and love
out of bitterness.
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Chapter Three Main Artistic Features of The Donnellys

This chapter mainly focuses on two most important features — documentary
theatre and stage metaphor — in Reaney’s creative writing since these two artistic
features define the trilogy’s style, and then followed by an overview of James
Reaney’s contribution to Canadian Drama.
3.1 Documentary Theatre
3.1.1 Clear the Ground

What is documentary theatre? Documentary theatre is “theatre based, usually for
propaganda purposes, on fact, as documented in material such as records, films,
newspapers, official reports, and transcripts of trials” (Hartnoll 127). Documentary
theatre is also known as Theatre of Fact. It is characterized by the use of objectivity
to promote a particular political statement. Gregory Mason defines documentary
theatre simply as drama that “presents and re-enacts records from history”. “Unlike
traditional drama,” he continues, “it is not founded on a freely imagined plot”
(Mason 263).
At first glance, this description is broad enough to include most
historically-inspired dramatic narratives. Mason, however, goes on to make it clear
that the document play may be linked, not simply to the events, but also to the
records of history. He traces the European roots of documentary theatre to German
writer Irwin Piscator’s production of Trotz Alleden in 1925. In fact, documentary
theatre has existed as a genre for as long as theatre itself has existed. Attilio Favorini,
professor of Theater Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, dates the first dramatic
documentary impulse back to 492 BC when the ancient Greek playwright Phrynicus
produced his play The Capture of Miletus about the Persian War. He traces the genre
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through to European medieval mystery plays, Elizabethan England and

Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, French revolutionary patriotic dramas, British and
American World War II Living Newspapers and German plays about the Holocaust.
Modern documentary theatre artists include Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Jones,
Nilaja Sun and the performance groups Culture Clash and the Tectonic Theater
Project.
The American Federal Theatre Project “Living Newspaper” productions of the
1930s also envisaged the documentary theatre as an authenticating agent, capable of
representing and thus affirming what the instruments of mainstream journalism
might avoid: the local, the anecdotal and the populist. Although their dramatization
of current historical problems used typical rather than strictly factual representations,
their loudspeaker interruption of dramatic action with historical and current
documentary information and questions posed directly to the audience is in sympathy
with Piscator’s anti-illusionism, and anticipates later attempts — among them the
Donnelly plays — to disengage the audience from coherent narrative in order to
encourage it to consider its position in relation to both historical and stage
representation. (Bennett 102)
The demise of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 ended documentary theatre as
a concerted movement until the 1960s. The documentary theatre becomes, in the
1960s, not just a method of authenticating a certain reality, but of questioning
supposed realities and the ways they are constructed. Mason notes in particular plays
in which
documentary information is presented in a deliberately obtrusive manner,

calling attention to the documents themselves as much as to the
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information the convey….The matter of the documents here serves to

confirm certain facts, but the manner in which they are presented
sharply challenges the notion of documentary objectivity.(Mason 270)
The document, in other words, no longer necessarily functions merely as invisible

background material or as evidence of events accepted as real, but may be
foregrounded and placed at issue. This kind of documentary play does not just attack
the notion of “art” as a region sealed off from history; it also challenges the notion of
historical representation as sealed off from international conflicts. As Mason suggests,
it often functions to interrogate the way we receive reality through its
representations.
3.1.2 Staging the Document in The Donnellys

Numerous social issues have marked the growth of Canada, and many of these
continue to shape contemporary Canadian culture. While many of these issues have
been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights.
Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society.
James Reaney uses documentary theatre as a main artistic technique in plays to
interrogate the reality, and to re-act the real history through its representations. He
represents the societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or
situations.
The Donnellys establishes a specifically documentary frame of reference. That is,
the play displays the documentary “frames” that incriminate the Donnelly family; the
texts that underwrite the central characters’ position in history and society become a
central element in the situation of the Donnellys in the play’s theatrical discourse.
Reaney indicates the play’s retentions of documentary traces when he addresses this
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statement to his audience in the introduction of The Donnellys:
When you immense yourself in this play, you may find that your
experience matches my own when I immersed myself some eight years
ago in documents which had lain for yeas and years in the attics of two
local courthouses: after a while I couldn’t stop thinking about them.
(Noonan 11)
The legal setting of Reaney’s activity is significant, since his plays appeal a
conversational verdict, or “true saying” of the Donnelly story as presented, for
example, in contemporary newspaper reports or Thomas Kelly’s apparently
documentary work The Black Donnellys, which Richard Stingle calls “a gothic
novel” (11). Reaney re-tries the evidence by re-contextualizing it in the discursive
setting of the Donnelly plays.
Alan Filewod poses that there are two most important common features of
Canadian documentary theatre. One is their emphasis on collective creation, which
refers to group collaboration involving the contribution of actors to researching and
writing the play as a whole, and especially their own roles; the other is the
transformation of historical or local community experience into drama. The
Donnellys follows the two common features that Filewod has defined.
Collective creation is seen as “a critique of the traditional role of the dramatic
author” (Jones 6). The using of this technique extends the role of contributing
“author” to agents distant from the plays’ twentieth-century composition. The
Donnelly plays were developed by collective creation in a workshop situation by
actors and audiences together. In 1975, the trilogy made a national tour by the
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NDWT Company, and at each stop the theatre workshops were conducted for adults
and children, participated by both audience and actors in order to develop a sense of
local and original theatre. This kind of workshop is named “hit-and-run” workshop,
which gives a tight connection with local community. Since the local people
participate in the theatre, their understanding of the theatre and also their
surroundings expands and extends.
Reaney uses the collage technique in The Donnellys to incorporate “outside”
writings like census records, maps, newspaper headlines and legal records, which
contribute the transformation of historical or local community experience into drama.
The function of using census records, maps, newspaper headlines and legal records
in documentary theatre is to introduce the setting, events, and characters and so on.
Take an inserts for example (Sticks and Stones 27):
Gaoler Stub
Name George Stub
Date When Committed Octomber 20th, 1848
Height Six feet
Colour of eyes Gray
Place of Birth Tipperary
Religion Church of England
For what committed Suspicion of arson, burning the coloured
settlers’ barns
Occupation Senator
Mr. Stub! I’m a storekeeper now, but that’s what
I’ll ask Macdonald for in 78 if I get
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his Catholic candidate all the

Orangeman’s votes.
Colour of eyes Gray
Only from the inserts, we can figure out the following information: Gaoler is the
surveyor and Stub is a suspect who commits for setting fire; Stub is far from
worrying about the trial since he still jokes with the surveyor; the white people hate
the cloloured settlers; Stub has the ambition to elect the senator; the election is
affected by religion and races. Through the connotation it carries, the inserts
transforms the local community into drama setting.
In Reaney’s drama of documentary collage, theatricality and textuality are
intimately connected just as Reaney implies “the written text is a performance text
too” (Jones 8). The Donnely plays validate the connection of theatricality and
textuality and prove that theatre is a space of interesting texts.
In the trilogy, Reaney stages the interesting text by scripting the historical voices,
creating the historical sets. He recalls chalking scores of names and sets, not only
Roman line names, but also things that historical people had actually said, or that the
old people interviewed in the area had actually told him of their memories about the
Donnellys. Therefore, the text or the language of history is staged and becomes an
element of the play’s theatrical setting and action.
The first part of the triology, Sticks and Stones, is more concerned with the
processes involved in representing theatrical and geographical space. For example,
Mrs. Donnelly said: “Now I’ve reached the borders of Biddulph” (Sticks and Stones
12). This statement draws attention to the way the play evokes a specific setting. In
the trilogy, especially when Sticks and Stones begins, the audiences are transported in
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place and time into Biddulph Township in the ninetieth century. The borders of
Biddulph are self-consciously drawn and redrawn by this play of texts. Sticks and
Stones elaborately sets its scene by using the map as both a literal document and a
representation of the inscription of social and historical space. In doing so, it
challenges the borders between cartographic, historical, and theatrical representation.
The map document in the trilogy also reveals a poetic tradition. Stephen Bann
comments on it like this: “Perhaps it is essentially within a poetic tradition, that the
map is capable of displaying a richness of significance over and beyond its status as
sign, when it becomes (so to speak) a vehicle for contemplation”(Bann 128). The
map becomes a kind of found document, set in the larger “poetic” context of the
trilogy. We can say the map is a backdrop that can provide a geographical context for
a reenacted incident set in Ireland.
Map shape not only shapes history, instead it is determined by history. Mapping
used in the Donnelly plays helps to articulate the immigrant’s myth of arrival in a
“new” world, also interprets the new world. For example, Mrs. Donnelly asserts the
newness of the new world in her speech to Will: “We’re where you were born — not
an old country, but a new country” (Sticks and Stones 20) A choric response, however,
undermines her speech. When Mrs. Donnelly affirms her determination to remain in
the new world — “Here we stay” — the chorus contrapuntally completes her
statement with “In Ireland,” drawing attention to the fact that the very meaning of
“here” is determined by its “setting,” and thus blurring the strictly geographical
distinction between “here” and “there”(Sticks and Stones 21).
The traditional document theatre is the theatre that presents a fictional
interpretation of events taken from non-fiction sources. The Donnellys, of course,
also exposes fictional elements from its non-fictional sources. The most important is
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newspaper reports, which is part of the structure of the Donnelly play though we
cannot assert that these reports are objective. Anyhow, Reaney doesn’t write history
that needs every detail exactly and objectively.
The newspaper is most obviously paralleled to theatre while used in a
play-within-a-play structure of the Medicine Show, which presents its own highly
colored version of the Donnelly family history. While doing this, the play’s sequence
is neither chronological nor logical in the presentation of the Donnelly massacre.
Thus it implicates the Gothicized portrayal of the Donnelly family in determining,
and not just describing, their fate.
The trilogy is viewed as an extension of the research activity, from which the
history is represented, though the representation of history is not, then, simply a
theme in The Donnellys. Documentary citation, through which Reaney reproduces
the society in the 19th century, is a theatrical gesture in the Donnelly plays. Historical
documentation is an integral element of the trilogy’s structure, as well as its verbal,
kinesics, and scenographic codes. The trilogy also draws on the formal structure of
the trial in its inclusion of perspective testimony. The language of the trilogy reflects
the society of the 19th century which has turned everyone into witnesses, with its
numerous quotations and vigorous replies. The trilogy focuses on the presentation
and testing of evidence just like a tribunal play does. All these define The Donnellys
as documentary theatre.
3.2 Stage Metaphor

Metaphor is “the most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one
thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting
another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the
two” (Baldick 134). Simply speaking, metaphor is the comparison of two unlike
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things using the verb “to be” and not using “like” or “as” as in a simile. Stage
metaphor refers to metaphor used in stage conversation. James Reaney uses stage
metaphor as a device a lot in The Donnellys just like his contemporary playwrights
do. The function of stage metaphor is to condense the plot action, clarify a theme,
make an abstract idea concrete or particularize a group experience and so on. All
these functions are obvious in the Donnelly plays, and Reaney also uses it as a
central structural principle to organize his play.
3.2.1 Classification of Reaney’s Stage Metaphors

If you have read his One Man Masque, Listen to the Wind, Colours in the Dark
or The Sun and the Moon, you will find for example, candles, shirts, stones, toys,
branches, windows, dishes, stars and string, Victorian tunes and hymns, coffins and
quilts, which are from Reaney’s private stock from where many of his stage
metaphors come. These objects and images are used as catalysts to crystallize the
super-saturated solutions of each play. Stage metaphor makes audiences have easy
understanding of most of his basic themes and gives the audience ways of locating
what occurs, when and where and how, in a trilogy which spans forty years, several
dozen locations, over one hundred characters and which continuously juxtaposes
cinematic and presentational dramatic conventions.
Audiences who are familiar with the development of Canadian documentary
theatre are accustomed to the conventional uses of stage metaphor. Reaney’s stage
metaphor can be divided to two types: visual and verbal stage metaphors. There are
various types of stage metaphor in The Donnellys, including stage props, chorus,
patterns of stage movement and sound collages, among which stage props and
patterns of stage movement are visual stage metaphors while chorus and sound
collages are verbal ones.
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Stage props are used often as carriers of metaphor. However, an object or a

sound effect is not a stage metaphor unless it represents at least two different things
at the same time. The conventional use of stage metaphor is using one object as
another while the emphasis is still on the qualities of the first. Reaney, however,
extends the technique one step further by using the first object as another but
emphasizing also another. For example, Will can use either a fiddle or a gun (Sticks
and Stones 40) to face the mob. If the actor is supplied with a fiddle, he plays it like a
gun that can shoot. If it is a gun, he uses it like using a fiddle. Both fiddle and gun
can be used at the same time since either is the other. Whatever Will chooses to use,
he uses it for the only purpose: to disarm a mob, though his choice may effect the
change of music and ballets. Reaney uses this technique to endow Will choosing
“weapon” by himself.
About the patterns of stage movement, the metaphor of stones and sticks is a
good example. Little Jennie once used four stones to make her playhouse in Sticks
and Stones. In the last scene of Part III, all that remains is “four stones where there
was a house/home” (Handcuffs 157), with a field of wheat that is ready for harvest
surrounded. The stones stand for bones of the Donnelly family. When Tom is
murdered, “William Donnelly takes up the stone that represents Tom and says:
‘These are the bones of my brother O’Halloran. / Tell us why you killed them’” (ibid
39). Later, when the Donnellys are Murdered Four “ladies” beat the stones with
pickaxes.
The chorus plays an important role in the Donnelly plays. Here we use the
Barley Corn Ballad song as example to explain the chorus’s metaphor function. The
song tells the barley’s life process: barley grain is planted, harvested, transported to
barns, threshed into grains, dipped in a well, sold to the brewer, and at last made into
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rye. “The barley grain should die” (Sticks and Stones 13) indicates the name
Donnelly that the good seed must die to live again. The wheat is threshed with a flail
made of sticks and then ground by stones. However, after the painful process, the
wheat becomes the strongest man. Hearing the song, the audience could not help
thinking the moment when James Donnelly is arrested for murder, he points to seven
stones (which represent his even sons) “waiting to spout up and show the world that I
live” (Sticks and Stones 62).
Reaney uses not only external objects, but also sound collages to form stage
metaphor. In the trilogy, there is such a moment that the Ireland reel on the
gramophone reasserts itself:
Mrs. Donnelly, he eyes bandaged, dances with Jennie to the gramophone

and then leaves….two times cross each other— the morning of Friday, 6
February 1880 and the summer afternoon in 1900. We hear sleigh bells
then the chuff chuff of the gramophone. (Sticks and Stones 65)
(Here the sleigh bell is also a motif which foreshadows the death of the Donnelly
fate.) The music is gone as Mrs. Donnelly is gone: her life is like a music, having
both bright and blue notes, finally ends just like her life; what is left is “the
mechanical, empty sound of the needle that has brought to life a performance long
over and the memory of a mother long dead” (Miller 37). This sounds metaphor
share some similarity with the Chinese phrase “曲终人散,” which means friends
come together enjoying themselves in a party, but when the party is over friends say
farewell to each other.
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3.2.2 Paradox in Reaney’s Stage Metaphors

Paradox is used often in The Donnellys, or exactly speaking the paradigmatic
function of metaphor is widely applied to the trilogy. A good example is the use of
“sticks” and “stones” motifs, which appear throughout the trilogy.
Fiddles to unite a dance and fences to divide the land are both made of sticks. A
stick cut into two and a stage bisected by stones represent the Donnelly’s farm is
halved by the Fat Lady. The Donnellys are sticks to make music and stones in the
social and political machinery of Biddulph. They belong to neither category. They
use both and they are both. When they are “sticks”, they make music; when they are
“stones”, they are beaten by also fight against “sticks”.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words never hurt me”(The St.
Nicholas Hotel, 129). The title of the first play is ironic because the Donnellys were
hurt by one word, one eqithet — Blackfeet (Whittaker 146). Stones break bones, but
the Donnellys are bones. The contradictions inherent in this stage metaphor and also
emphasized in so many places are transcended in the last scene of the trilogy by the
words and gestures of the Donnelly children. “Four stones where there once a
house/home” are now surrounded by a field of wheat ready for harvest (Handcuffs
157). In the trilogy’s last set, each son or daughter transforms a stone. Pat makes his
stone into an anvil on which he breaks the handcuffs that Reaney has used to
symbolize the fears, lies and old myths that handcuff minds. Bob kisses his stone
treating it as his father’s heart. William regards his stone as the undestroyed and
unbreakable symbol of his family’s unity — “Weep for one not four”. At the last
scene of Part III, Jennie’s lines transform her stone into the bone in a box from the
play’s opening scene, linking “a piece of bone from my mother’s arm”(ibid 237) to
“the loving arm that never failed to throw protection around and provide for all of us
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in the darkest day of our need”(ibid 158).
3.2.3 Three Ruling Stage Metaphors

Reaney has chosen for each part of the trilogy its own ruling stage metaphor:
The ruling stage metaphor in Sticks and Stones is a ladder, in The St. Nicholas Hotel
is a top, in Handcuffs is a curtain. “Each metaphor also forms the core of a system of
relationships whose function is the exploration of logical paradoxes” (Miller 38).
The ladder has different functions on stage. The usual function is to serve as a
means of safe ascent and decent, while the unusual ones are many: on Judith
Donnelly’s grueling trip to Goderich, ladders are treacherous hills to climb; instead
of serving as stairs which connect one level with another, ladders are boundaries
keeping people in place; sometimes they signify roads; when men kill each other
over those boundaries, ladders serve as the bars of their prisons; in later plays they
symbolize casual freedom — tress to swing in or a route to a girl’s bedroom; the
Donnellys’ house in Sticks and Stones is made of ladders, which help to make good
balance and even the Fat Lady cannot pull down. In Handcuffs the ladder serves as a
perch where the Bishop observes his murderous flock. The last ladder is a precarious
refuge for Bridget from the vigilantes.
The ladders in Sticks and Stones is inclined to make a vertical centered look of
the play, while in The St. Nicholas Hotel and Handcuffs they are often held
horizontally as tollgates or laid flat on the ground as railway tracks, and they point
nowhere.
The tops running through The St. Nicholas Hotel are small and colorful. Their
function is giving the second part of the trilogy a centrifugal pattern of movement. In
this part the Donnellys are the champion top spinners. Though the energy and
playfulness associated with tops is spun by social and political forces beyond their
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control. Tops are small objects for play, not work. However, throughout tops’ circular
shape and motion, we see buggy and wagon wheels, spinning-wheels, the gears of
threshing machines and the endless journeys of racing coaches but which often seem
unlikely to arrive in one piece. By the end of the Part II, the Donnelly family seems
hemmed in by the endless circular rules of church and state. The physical action of a
top spinning also brings into focus on the idea of an encircled fortress mentality
which begins to infect the Donnellys and their friends.
Curtains dominate Handcuffs and whenever curtains appear our sight lines are
fragmented. Curtains can deceive or separate or lie. Theresa Connors hides her
cupboard full of whiskey under the curtain so that the priest cannot find it. Judith as a
penitent tries to find the priest who eludes her by pulling back curtain after curtain.
She cannot tear down the veils of prejudice between her family and the community
just like she cannot penetrate the blowing curtains. Mary Donovan swears she never
saw the murderers who killed the Donnellys or the fire that destroy the Donnellys in
the court. However, at the same time a tough appear on her window to mock is
forced by Mr. and Mrs. Donnelly’ ghosts to see the other curtain behind the first one,
on which is written “murdered”.
All three parts of the play use visual and verbal metaphors, which functions to
organize the play visually, recur as a motif in the other plays, and serve to remind the
audience of previous scenes, characters, and ideas, thereby giving coherence to the
trilogy as a whole. This technique helps audiences find their way through the
complex materials Reaney presents and is a main artistic feature of the trilogy.
3.3 “Reaney Play”: Reaney’s Contribution to Canadian Drama

Documentary theatre and the use of stage metaphor are the two main artistic
features of The Donnellys. Except these two creating techniques, Reaney also uses
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many other techniques to create his trilogy, for example, poetic drama, myth and
melodrama. To put his dramaturgy in one sentence, we can say: he has combined
archival research, metaphor, poetry, elements of romance and melodrama, miming
and myth to tell the central stories and legends of Ontario. By doing this, he
introduced a new kind of theatre into Canada — Reaney play — a term given by
Geraldine Anthony in Stage Voices (1978):
His complex symbolic and poetic regional drama defines categorizing.

Folk play is not comprehensive enough and poetic drama is too narrow a
term. As Herman Voaden had to introduce the new term Symphonic
Expressionism to describe his contribution to Canadian theatre, so
James Reaney will have to provide the critics with a term to denote that
fine mixture of symbol, metaphor, chant, poetic incantation, choral
speaking, improvisation, miming, and child play which combined in one
perfect union is the Reaney play.”(140)
The above quotation gives Reaney a very high appraisement, which is 90 percent fair
and accurate.
Take his trilogy The Donnellys for example, much of the material in the final
script is developed through collective improvisation in what Reaney calls his
“Listeners’ Workshops”, a process in which a large number of people can create
plays in a short time. Basic images and inspirations can come from any number of
sources — a poem, a picture, a game, a newspaper headline, a history book, etc.
Participants then work spontaneously to make up the details of characterization, plot
and staging in response to the source material.
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The use of stage metaphor is already analyzed in the above section. What we
have to mention is Reaney’s complex symbols. There are many symbols used in The
Donnellys: the seven Donnelly boys are symbolized as seven white shirts on the rope
or seven stones in a line; the country road is like a ladder; the vice-governor couple
are two dolls; a greedy Fat Lady is replaced by a lovely burner in the washhouse; the
Donnellys are rigid “stones” and their enemies are “sticks”. All these symbols leave
the audiences huge space to imagine.
As a major Canadian poet turned playwright, it is natural that in Reaney’s plays
there are many poetic elements. Poetic drama depends on forces above or below
consciousness to guide and determine action, that is, it is “driven by unrealized
factor” (Barr 78). In The Donnellys, the forces that determine the action are the force
of evil and the force of good. All the characters symbolize either the good or the evil,
but not pure good and evil. The good and the evil are defined under many standards,
the God or the Biddulph community or the audiences’ understanding. Therefore, the
good and the evil can be transformed.
The medicine show in the trilogy is a melodrama to satire and mime Kelly’s
prejudice story The Black Donnellys. This is what we call “play-in-a-play”, which
also contributes the style of Reaney play.
Reaney creates a strikingly distinctive style not only for the creation but also for
its performance, which has a profound impact on a generation of Canadian theatre
artists. In performance, the trilogy emphasizes group collaboration over individual
characterizations in what is often described as an ensemble approach. Other
hallmarks of his style include: actors playing multiple roles; actors in character
commenting directly to the audience; minimal use of scenery, with actors using their
bodies and stage positions to indicate changes in location and to create strong visual
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images; other non-realistic elements such as self-consciously “theatrical” lighting

effects, singing, dancing, and choral speaking.
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Chapter Four Tragic Factors Analysis of The Donnellys

The Donnellys is a historical tragedy, which roots deep in the society of that time.
What kind of situation would cause such a disaster like the massacre of the
Donnellys? The explanation that caused the tragedy will be given in this Chapter.
4.1 Historical Factors — Biddulph Township Feud

Canada is a land of many cultures and many peoples, which form a “mosaic
culture” (Zhao Wenwei 74). Aboriginal peoples have occupied the territory now
called “Canada” for several thousand years. Everybody, either by birth or by descent,
has been an immigrant — they have all come from somewhere else. It has been said
that Canada is a nation of immigrants. As a country, Canada came into being on July
1, 1867. This event is known as “Confederation”.
In the late 18th and the early 19th century, during and after the time of the
American Revolution, many African-Americans and United Empire Loyalists fled
the United States for Canada, where British ties remained and slavery had been
abolished (Wang Xuemei 166). During the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th century,
waves of immigrants arrived from Europe, attracted by the opportunity of a new and
better life in Canada. Many were farmers who turned the prairie region into wheat
fields. Many immigrants helped build Canada’s national railways. Canada’s
experience during this period raised awareness of the needs of refugees as their new
settlers. The government even advertised to attract emigrants by providing
inexpensive and fertile farmland.
The expanding of Ireland population in the early 1800’s, the growing
dependency on a single crop — the potato caused Ireland’s suffering in the Great
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Famine. In fact, while the blight of potatoes provided the catalysts for the famine, the
calamity was essentially man-made, a poison of blind politics, scientific ignorance,
rural suppression and enforced poverty. Not only religious matters but also
prejudices against the poor Ireland Catholics were key elements that led to the
catastrophe.
Because of the “push and pull” factors, millions of Irish people immigrated to
Canada in search for better life. Many families, much like the Donnellys, were
enticed to leave their homes in Ireland for Canada for many kinds of reasons, hoping
to improve their life quality. Biddulph, where the Donnellys settled, had a feud
between its settlers, which is known as the Biddulph Township feud, and which led
to the deaths of the Donnelly family.
To understand the feud better, we also should know some local history. In 1829,
Biddulph became a refuge for a group of free slaves from Ohio, who were under
threat of being enslaved again. The black were granted land by the Canada Company.
Most of them came from city life and did not adapt well to the harsh farming
environment. Lots of land needed to be cleared (logged), and efforts had to be made
to sustain the colony. Many of the black moved on to larger, growing urban centers
such as Detroit, Cleveland or Toronto to obtain wage-based employment.
When many moved to town, a small number remained on the land through
subsequent generations. The area was thus further logged and settled by whites,
many from Ireland, some of whom purchased farmsteads from the departing Blacks
or new lots sold to them cheaply by the Canadian Company. After 1850, the majority
of the townships’ landholders were Irish Catholics, most originating from County
Tipperary, Ireland.
The balance of profits in land assessment was so difficult that the Old Country
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(mainly refer to Ireland where also the feud problem and where the settlers of
Biddulph come from) feud was rekindled. If this is an accident in history, then the
Donnellys are the casualties in the accident. They were consumed in the flames of
the feud, quite literally burning their way into history.
4.1.1 War of Land

Many reasons cause the Biddulph feud and the death of the family, but the most
important and the most essential one is the scramble for land (Guo Jide 1999:190).
Immigrants from Ireland come for new and better life. Just like Mrs. Donnelly says,
“we are not there (Ireland) anymore, Will. We’re where you were born — not an old
country, but a new country” (Sticks and Stones 20). When a person comes to a new
country where the people earn living from corns, and especially after suffering the
famine, land becomes the most valued belongings to them.
The Donnelly family first settled on a piece of vacant land of about 100 acres on
lot 18, concession 6, on the Roman line in the township of Biddulph, near Lucan,
Ontario, where was formerly named Marysville. This piece of land was wild prairie
region and needed to be cleared into wheat fields. The family work hard on it and
have 30 acres logged when the census taker, Mr. Darcy, came to do the survey for
the first time. However, he reminded the Donnellys to keep in touch with Mr. Grace
(the landlord of the family), who said “no one was living on it (while his land rented
by the Donnellys)” (ibid 23). Some mysterious people also put notice on the tree in
the Donnelly’s yard, saying “Squatters and Trespassers. Notice is hereby given” (ibid
24). This was the sign of land war between immigrants.
The land that the Donnelly family rented was improved through tilling. Such
rich fertile land was the right thing those new settlers wanted to buy and also the
right thing the Donnellys never let go. No person was allowed to purchase land over
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their heads. “Over my head is under my feet,” Mr. Donnelly said to his wife, “Old
John Grace is not going to sell it from either over us or under us till he considers our
offer and his promise” (Sticks and Stones 24). The Donnellys believed that Mr. Grace
would sell them the land at a fair price as he promised while the latter was regretting
so much that he planned to sell to others who bids higher. He excused he never
expected that his prairie would turn into such fertile wheat field. Therefore he sold
the land to a man who provided a higher price without thinking it was the Donnellys
turned his wild grass land into wheat field. The man who gets those 50 acres of land
where the Donnellys live is Mr. Fat (the author name him Mr. Fat for his wife is as
broad as she was long and named the “Fat Lady”), a Whitefoot.
At this time, 70 acres of land out of 100 were cleared. At first Mr. Fat got the 50
acres of cleared land where the Donnellys’ house set on, and the left 20 acres of
cleared land together with 30 acres of wild land belonged to the Donnellys. The Fat
Lady tried to pull down the Donnellys’ house to drive them away from the land they
bought. The Fat Lady’s brother Patrick Farl helped to break down the house, and was
shot in the arm by James Donnelly. He bore this hatred in mind and when James was
going to work on the bee, he began a fight with him. Both of them were a little drunk
and no one stopped them. At last Mr. Donnelly accidentally killed Farl accidentally
in the fight, for which he was sentenced seven years in prison.
The war of land was not only between Whitefeet and Blackfeet, but also
happened among other interest groups, for example, the White and the Black, the
Roman line and the Protestant line. A settler named George Stub, an ultra-Protestant,
burned the Black’s barns where a railroad was to built, and threatened the Black for
land like this: “if you don’t sell me that corner five acres you have squatted on there
I’m going to heat it hotter than hell, and something else so serious might happen that
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they’ll have to erect a gallows for me” (Sticks and Stones 26). Watching their
property burning in fire, the colored settlers could do nothing but leave.
George Stub then persuaded Mr. Donnelly to sell his land and move away with
the excuse that there was not enough land in Biddulph Township for seven Donnellys.
His logic was James Donnelly had seven sons, and if each gave birth to another
seven, it was too big a number. Mr. Donnelly refuted him with “Gallagher has eight
boys” (Sticks and Stones 88) and left his “advice” back. The Fat Lady also tried to
drive the Donnellys out of Biddulph. After coming back home from prison, Mr.
Donnelly enlarged his land through buying new land from the Mulowney brothers.
The Fat Lady, again, jumped out to provoke the business. She wanted the other 25
acres beside those 25 that would be sold to the Donnellys. She started the war with
plugging up the creek run through both families’ lands to blood the Donnellys’
backfield. At last, she lost in the water battle. However, as Jenny said, their victory
was a dangerous one. At the night of their water war, the barns of the Donnellys were
burned.
It is land that makes these people so evil. They do everything they can that goes
beyond the morality, only for winning more land in the battle. Therefore, from the
above examples we can see that land is the essential factor that causes the blood feud
and the conflicts between the Donnellys and their neighbors which can be seen
everywhere in the community. All settlers, old ones and new ones, the Black and the
White, the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, the Whitefeet and the Blackfeet,
have conflicts on the partition and business of land.
4.1.2 Social Violence

Social violence was a big problem at the 19th century’s Biddulph since the
government did not have a good form, and lawyers as well as judges were powerless
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to convict sins. On one hand, settlers came from different nation with different colors
and religions cannot introject with each other immediately. On the other hand, they
had conflicts in the partition of interests. Mob ganged together committing sins like
aggravated assault, battery, property damage and murder.
In 1856, a very important railway route possessed by the Grand Trunk Railway
was built passing through the village. As a result of quicker access to larger
marketplaces, such as Toronto further to the east, the village and its surrounding
townships prospered. And also because of the railway, many lands were occupied
and a new land feud began.
The black people, who settled earlier than Irish immigrates in the Biddulph
Township, were driven away. Their houses were destroyed by fire. The reason can be
found in Mr. Donnelly’s words — the colored settlers had come to those concessions
ten years before any of us came from Ireland and it was their bad luck to have farms
just where the new railroad slated to cross the Proof Line Road from London to
Goderich (Sticks and Stones 26). Burning of house on barrel routine was set up with
disguised men, and George Stub, the ultra-Protestant. The poor colored people
watching this, but cannot prevent the mob burning their property.
The breakage of property in public was a signal of the community’s bad
law-and-order situation. That People were killed and no one was bought to trial for
murder showed how serous the chaos was. In the riot at Andrw Keefe’s tavern (Sticks
and Stones 30), Sticks (protestant line) and Stones (Roman line) fighted against each
other with clubs and stones. In the fight between George Armstrong and Thomas
Cassleigh, Brimmacombe didn’t help the latter, who hates him for this. Several days
later he was found dead in the snow. Cassleigh was bought to trial for the dead of
Brimmacombe, however, was free of any punishment at last. The reason was one of
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his friends stole the witness papers from the courthouse.

The Whitefeet engaged in what James Reaney described as “recreational
violence…for hardly any reason at all” (James 3). This culture of clan violence was
brought to Canada by immigrants from County Tipperary. The violence of the
whitefeet, rooted in religion, is the most related to the Donnellys’ deaths. In Sticks
and Stones, Act Three, when Sid Skinner and Jim Carroll planned to kill Mike
Donnelly, Sid said, “It’s a great thing I’m to do, kill a man and go to prison for God
knows how long” (34). For someone, killing a person is regarded as “a great thing”,
which is the result of the stage feud.
Whenever there is hatred between two parties, one party definitely takes revenge.
If the hatred is not so deep, he maybe just breaks the water pipes, burns the barns and
house, or kills the animals of his enemy. If he really hates the enemy, there probably
will be a murder. Under such circumstances, the massacre of the Donnelly family is
not surprising.
4.1.3 Religion and Faction Conflicts

Burke Edmund, a British parliamentarian, orator, and political philosopher, once
said, “religion is essentially the art and theory of the making of man” (Internet).
People with different beliefs thus belong to different systems that may lead to
conflicts in daily life. The religion conflicts are mainly between Protestantism and
Roman Catholicism in the trilogy. The faction conflicts related with the Donnellys
are between the Whitfeet and Blackfeet.
The religion conflicts between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in
Biddulph root in that of Ireland. Protestantism has in general made for political
freedom and political Radicalism, and it has been opposed to slavish worship of
kings and aristocrats. In Ireland, the word “Protestant” is almost a convertible term
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with Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred of all that
savours of genuine political independence on the part of the “lower classes”. And in
the same manner, Catholicism which in most parts of Europe is synonymous with
Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred of all that
savours of genuine political independence on the part of the lower classes, in Ireland
is almost synonymous with rebellious tendencies, zeal for democracy, and intense
feelings of solidarity with all strivings upward of those who toil.
This peculiar situation explains some poor Catholics form a secret society
against their Protestants landlords. Their conflicts began as early as Queen
Elizabeth’s time. The warfare between Elizabeth and his sister bloody Mary is the
war to some extent between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The crusade also
happened around the Donnelly family.
When electing the Parliament, usually the people of one religion vote for the
candidates from the same religion. Between the two candidates Holmas, the Liberal
and Protestant candidate, and Carroll, the Conservative and Roman Catholic
candidate, the Donnelly family voted the former. Their seven votes made Cayley lost
his election. The Church and the defeated candidate, therefore, blamed the family for
that and decided to “punish” them. The new priest formed a society against the
Donnelly family among their fellow parishioners (Sticks and Stones 36).
However, the conflicts between different regions are only part of the feud, while
the most important reason is inside the Roman Catholic line, that is, the faction
conflicts between Whitefeet and Blackfeet. The following script is from Sticks and
Stones:
Mr. Donnelly: Now you were and there you did it again. What’s eating you?
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What have I done to you that you want to pull down our house?
Farl: Not a bloody thing, Jim, only that you’re a blackleg back in the old country.
Mr. Donnelly: What did you call me?
Farl: Sure, don’t you know what I called you?
Mr. Donnelly: By your heart cease calling me Blackfoot. You’ve been calling me
and my children that ever since you arrived here two years ago.
Farl: Didn’t call you Blackfoot, called you blackleg, but I’ll call you Blackfoot if
you like.
Mr. Donnelly: Don’t call me that in front of the others and start that all over
again. (44)
The quotation exactly corroborates James Reaney’s comment on the violence

between Whitefeet and Blackfeet as: “recreational violence…for hardly any reason at
all” (James 3). Even though there is no reason for them to hate each other and for all
the violence committed by the Whitefeet, there is some reason the Roman Catholics
are divided into Whitefeet and Blackfeet. As we have analyzed, for the Whitefeet,
Protestants landlords were tyrants, robbers and murderers who robbed their little
spots and turned them out to perish. Those who still rented land from the Protestants
landlords and those who hadn’t joined them to against their landlords became their
enemies on the other side. In Biddulph, they had no Protestants English landlords,
but they still continued their violence on Blackfeet. This is named ruffianism, the evil
quality in humanness.
Being caught in the religion and faction conflicts, the Donnellys still refused to
give up their ideal and principle. What they did and who they were leave us another
reason of their tragic fate.
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4.2 Personal Factors

The Donnellys were consumed in its flames of the feud and became victims of
history. When we say like this we are on the same side with James Reaney, Orlo
Miller and others who showed their mercy on the Donnellys, against Thomas P.
Kelley, who made the Donnellys black in his book The Black Donnellys. It is clear
today that Kelley misled the way and the Donnelly family is not “black” as he wrote.
They are victims of history. Then we want to ask why the Donnellys but not other
Biddulph family becomes the victim of history in such a massacre. It is not easy to
give a straightforward answer to this question. However, we can make a logical
conjecture from the Donnellys’ personal factors according to Reaney’s scripts.
First, it is the father, James Donnelly Sr., who killed Patrick Farrell. In the spring
of 1847, James Donnelly ended up his rights of ploughing Lot 18, Concession 6 (also
known as the Roman Line), since the Fat Lady bought half of the land from his
absentee landlord Mr. Grace, who promised him to sell the wilderness to him ten
years later. He did not have the money to actually purchase those 100 acres of land,
and he never thought others would come to claim it, therefore the family worked on
the land to make it a clear farm with the hope that someday they would own it. In
fact, at that time squatting was a very common North American frontier practice and
one was often supported by the common law of property rights.
Patrick Farl’s sister came from the old country and purchased land including the
Donnellys’ land. Farl wished to evict the Donnellys away and sued them on the court.
The result of the judgment was that the Donnellys could keep and reside on 50 acres
of that land, which was only half of what the Donnellys had actually cleared over the
ten years. Farl lambasted the Donnellys in public and the two engaged in a drunken
brawl, in which Mr. Donnelly killed Farl. At last James Reaney gave himself up to
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the court. Although Mr. Donnelly spent seven years in prison for his killing of the
Fat Lady’s brother, the hatred was still there. From the beginning to the end, the two
families were deadly enemies.
Second, the Donnellys were Blackfeet while most of their neighbors are
Whitefeet. Mrs. Donnelly said she would rather choose to be called scab, or leper or
nigger or heretic or Blackfoot than do what the Whitefeet did to the Sheas (Sticks and
Stones 17). The Donnellys refused to join their Whitefeet compatriots, while they
knew clear what they would confront with choosing to be a Blackfoot. It seemed like
they never regretted to be Blackfeet except that Jenny once said it was better to be
black than just black in feet. She was the only one who did not want to be a
Blackfoot and left the Biddulph community before the massacre happened. The
Donnellys chose to be Blackfeet, but they were not the only Balckfeet. The
difference is they were unafraid to show their identity as Blackfeet. They defied their
enemies under their nose.
Third, the Donnelly boys never show hesitates in participating in the feud. The
Donnelly Stagecoach Line was started on May 24, 1873 by William Donnelly and
his brothers, Michael, John and Thomas, which was a huge success. Their line of
stages that ran among London, Lucan and Exeter even rivaled the official mail stage
that had been in business since 1838. The Hawkshaw stage line, where Will first has
worked for, soon felt the pressure of competition from the Donnelly’s. In October
1873, Hawkshaw sold his stage to Patrick Finnegan, a Husky Irishman, who was
hell-bent on running the Donnelly Stagecoach into the ground. This led to the feud
between the Donnelly Stagecoach and the Finnegan Stage. What followed was a
reign of violence that gripped Biddulph by the throat: stages were either smashed or
burned; horses were savagely beaten or killed; and stables were burned to the
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ground.
The violence that erupted in the Stagecoach feud was not only blamed (for the
most part) on their enemies, but also on the Donnellys. This brought the family bad
reputations. From then on, almost every crime committed was blamed on the
“notorious” family. If someone’s barn was burned down, angry fingers pointed at the
Donnellys. If a farmer’s prized cow was stolen, or his cattle found mutilated in the
fields, the Donnellys were blamed.
Last but not least is the personal animosity between the Donnellys and the
members of the Biddulph community. Because of the land snatch, the Donnelly
family had furious conflicts with the Fat Lady. Then they voted the Protestant
candidate in the election, for which they lost their last chance to be members that
were identified with other Catholics. In the competition of the stage race, they made
enemies with the Finnegan family. At last they took the whole community as their
enemies.
The Donnellys along with other immigrates came to Canada, the untilled land,
experienced the tough life. The society was queasy, with mobs spreading the
community of Biddulph; every new settler had to work hard for his new life, and
sometimes even to fight for land that guaranteed their food; the violence scared those
who loved peace; religion and faction conflicts served as fuse of the feud. All these
set the tragic context for the Donnellys’ fate. Besides the historical facts, the
Donnellys themselves were blamed for their own deaths. The father killed a man
though he did not mean to; it seemed that the Donnellys liked to show their
difference as Blackfeet and they were pugnacious people who hated been defeated.
Because of the historical factors and their personal reasons, the Donnellys’ tragic fate
is inevitable.
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Conclusion
James Reaney wrote in a 1962 poem, “Let’s make a form out of this:
documentary on one side and myth on the other.” He did as he said. The Donnellys is
a successful history trilogy on a local folk legend of the Donnelly family. Perhaps no
other Canadian dramatist or poet has so successfully transmuted the local into the
universal, the stuff of documentary into the stuff of myth.
The Donnelly plays, the actual historic Donnellys of Biddulph Township were
massacred by their Whitefeet neighbors in 1880. Three men and two women died,
and six men were charged and brought to trial, but none convicted. The murders
stemmed from prior feuds in Ireland, before the various participants immigrated to
Canada, where they continued their deadly games. James Donnelly had himself
killed a man in Canada and served seven years for the crime. At the end his clan was
massacred in the unfair game.
Since the 1880s, legend had woven itself around “the black Donnellys”,
so-called by Thomas P. Kelley, who published a book of that title in 1954. Kelley
blamed the Donnellys and said, in effect, they were so nasty that they deserved their
own deaths. Another book in 1962 by Orlo Miller, The Donnellys Must Die, blamed
the opposite faction for troubles imported from Ireland. After much research and
years in the writing of his plays, James Reaney plumps down on the side of the
Donnellys and intends to represent the facts to wash the name of the Black Donnelly.
Using all sorts of stage devices instead of the impossible number of sets that
would be needed, with actors playing many parts, his prose what prose writers love
to call “poetic”, and sometimes surrealistic, Reaney depicts the Donnellys and their
times, complete with friends and enemies, for a period of more than thirty-five years.
This is a big canvas. Reaney uses all of it for his trilogy, presenting the Donnellys as
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a family who refused to be pushed around or leave the township when so ordered,
and clung to their land in their new country with as much proud tenacity as love.
For the shift of people and sets, the play-in-a-play, and many other various stage
devices Reaney put in the trilogy, Readers may feel dizzy when reading The
Donnellys, However, it is undoubted the play definitely is a tour de force, and very
impressive. It drew raves from critics, awards from award-givers, and presumably
large audiences. All those critical articles about the trilogy I read are compliments.
Not that these the trilogy isn’t deserving of praise — they are; but the tendency to go
overboard makes it necessary to retain some kind of perspectives.
The trilogy, as a historical tragedy, depicts its characters not so real. The people
are both more and less than people. Few of the characters of The Donnellys are
likeable or have very much to recommend them to readers or audience. If there is
such a thing as the human spirit, it may be exemplified in the spirit of James
Donnelly and his family who refuse to bend the knee and leave their home in
Biddulph Township. Anyhow The Donnellys is an impressive achievement, and I
doubt that of that kind anyone will surpass it in Canada.
Through the analysis of its artistic features and tragic factors, this thesis has a
good recognition of Reaney’s achievements he gains in The Donnellys. His first
achievement is his special form of play —“Reaney play”. Using documents to
represent history, with the help of stage metaphor to organize his materials, Reaney
creates his Donnelly plays, from which we can know his unique dramaturgies — a
new style “Reaney Play”. Documents help to interrogate the reality, and to re-act the
real history through their representations. Reaney represents the societal forces using
a close reexamination of events, individuals, and situations. Stage metaphor plays an
important role in condensing the plot action, clarifying a theme and making an
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abstract idea concrete

A global picture of the 19th century’s Canada unfolds after reading it: a rural
place of horses and wagons, logging bees, drinking, and foreboding doom spreading
over everything. Walking ghosts and a non-Greek chorus keep things moving in the
way of exposition. There is also a play within the play, parodying Thomas P.
Kelley’s The Black Donnellys; and inside the play is James Donnelly correcting the
facts of his own family outside the interior play.
Reaney’s second achievement is his reproduction of the history. By doing this he
washes the bad names off the Donnellys. Why the Donnellys had bad reputation and
were murdered by their Whitefeet neighbors? Why no one was convicted guilty and
all those murderers were at large? Answers lie in history and the family themselves.
In the nineteenth century, southwestern Ontario was full of gangdoms and the
whole nation was in a state of “big fishes eating small ones, and small fishes eating
shrimps”. The Donnelly family, as new immigrants, obviously belonged to the
shrimp group. However, they were strong Donnellys who swore to defense their
names. The Donnellys had many conflicts with their neighbors because of certain
reasons — land, violence and religion, and were murdered at last. However, the
Donnellys themselves should also be responsible for their deaths: James Donnelly Sr.
killed Patrick Farl; the Donnellys were Blackfeet and were unafraid to show it; the
Donnelly boys enthusiastically participated in the feud; and there was personal
animosity between the Donnellys and other members of Biddulph community. This
part is the newest part that the thesis has contributed for comments on The Donnellys
since no other critics or scholars have worked on it.
Since no other thesis has studied James Reaney, let alone his historical trilogy
The Donnellys, the thesis fills, to some extent, a domestic gap in this field to some
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extent. However, no thesis can analyze a literary work exhaustedly, nor does this one,
which is only a tentative analysis of a fresh trilogy. As it always is, there is still great
room for further research on this subject. Due to limited resource, the analysis of the
tragic factors is only based on the play book itself, and therefore, the analysis is not
so deep in water and deserves further study. During the process of writing this thesis,
my deep-felt feeling is that information is the most important and indispensable
condition for academic research. I hope this thesis will be helpful for further research
on James Reaney in the future.
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Chronology of James Reaney

1926 Bore in South Easthope, near Stradford, Ontario, son of James Nesbitt
and Elizabeth Henrietta (Crerar) Reaney.
1932-39 Elementary education at the country schoolhouse, Elmhurst School, near
home.
1939-44 High school education at Stratford Collegiate and Vocational Institute in
Stratford, Ontario.
1944-48 Attended the University of Toronto, majoring in English Literature. First
book, of poetry and short stories published.
1949 Received his M.A. in English from the University of Toronto and won the
Governor-General’s award for poetry and his first volume, The Red Heart.
1951 Married colleen Thibaudeau, poet and fellow student at the University of
Toronto.
1950-60 Taught at the University of Manitoba.
1952 First child born, James Stewart.
1954 Second child born, John Andrew.
1956-58 Two-year sabbatical in which Reaney worked on his doctoral thesis, “The
Influence of Spenser on Yeats,” under the supervision of Northrop Frye.
Received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto and
published his second Governor-General’s award for poetry. Wrote “The
Rules of Joy.”
1959 Third child born, Susan Alice Elizabeth.
1960 Moved with his family to London, Ontario, where he became a member
of the English Department at the University of Western Ontario. The
Killdeer, One-Man Masque, and Night-Blooming Cereus produced in
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Toronto.
1962 Awarded his third Governor-General’s award for the publication of The
Killdeer and Other Plays and Twelve Letters to A Small Town. The Easter
Egg premiered in Toronto and London, Ontario.
1963 Names and Nicknames, produced in Winnipeg.
1964-65 The Sun and the Moon, produced in London, Ontario. Three marionette
plays, Applebutter, “Little Red-Riding Hood,” and “Aladdin and the
Magic Lamp,” produced for the Western Fall Fair at London. Wrote
“Let’s Make a Carol” and “The Shivaree.”
1966 Directed his own play, Listen to the Wind, in London, Ontario. Wrote
“Ignoramus.”
1967-68 Moved with his family to Victoria, B.C., for a sabbatical year, during
which time he began writing The Donnelly Trilogy. Also wrote “Don’t
Sell Mr. Aesop” and “Genesis.”
1973 Sticks and Stones, the first part of The Donnelly Trilogy, produced at
Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, after an intensive workshop for it in Halifax.
Wrote “The Greek Alphabet.”
1974 St. Nicholas Hotel, the second part of The Donnelly Trilogy, produced at
Tarragon Theatre, after Halifax workshop. Received the Chalmers award
for the Best Canadian Play of 1974.
1975 Handcuffs, the third part of The Donnelly Trilogy, produced at Tarragon
Theatre, after Halifax workshop.
1976 Traveled with the NDWT theatre company across Canada presenting the
entire Donnelly Trilogy on successive nights in theatres from Halifax to
Vancouver. Baldoon, written in collaboration with Marty Gervais,
-68-
produced with NDWT at Bathurst Street theatre, directed by Keith

Turnbull.
1977 NDWT Theatre Company toured Ontario with Baldoon. Premiere at the
Hart house Theatre in Toronto of new play, “The Dismissal,” produced by
NDWT in co-operation with University College and directed by Keith
Turnbull.
-69-
哈尔滨工业大学硕士学位论文原创性声明
本人郑重声明：此处所提交的硕士学位论文《〈唐纳利一家〉之艺术特色及
悲剧因素分析》，是本人在导师指导下，在哈尔滨工业大学攻读硕士学位期间独
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-70-
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks first go to Professor Liu Xiaodan, my supervisor, for her
precise guidance and her constant encouragement during my study and academic
research at Harbin Institute of Technology. She not only provided materials
generously, but also gave many invaluable suggestions and criticisms for my thesis,
without which it is impossible for me to finish it.
I am also profoundly indebted to all the professors who gave me lots of help and
suggestions for the thesis. Dr. Alison Calder of Manitoba University sent me the play
book of Sticks and Stones, which is not available at home. Professor Shi Bingyan and
Professor Tian Qiang read my script and improved my thesis not only in language
but also in contents. Professor Fu Li, Professor Liu Kedong, Professor Kong Ying
and Lecturer Wang Jing are all so kind to help me in collecting materials.
I also would like to give my gratitude to Professor Song Li， Professor Li
Xiaohong, Professor Zhao Yuqing, Professor Ma Lin and all other teachers who gave
me valuable suggestions which greatly helped me during the completion of my
thesis.
Special thanks also go to my friend and roommate Cheng Xinxia, who helped
correct the mistakes in my thesis. I also give my sincere thanks to all classmates who
have given me help on writing this thesis.
There are many others, named or not, whose support has made this thesis
possible. To all of them, I offer my sincere thanks
-71-

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《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析 魏秀娟

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硕士学位论文

ANALYSIS OF ARTISTIC FEATURES AND TRAGIC

Graduation Thesis for the M. A. Degree

Analysis of Artistic Features and Tragic

Candidate: Wei Xiujuan

Supervisor: Prof. Liu Xiaodan

Academic Degree Applied for: Master of Arts

Specialty: Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics

Affiliation: School of Foreign Languages

Date of Oral Defense: July 1, 2008

Degree Conferring Institution : Harbin Institute of Technology

Keywords Canadian drama; Reaney play; documentary theatre; stage metaphor

Chapter One A Brief Introduction of Canadian Drama and

1.1.1 Earlier Canadian Drama

1.1.2 In the 19th Century: Postcolonial Resistance

on intertextual recognition of its European classical models, in which satires

and its inhabitants (Mair’s Tecumseh [1866]).

1.1.3 Modern Canadian Drama

American theatre of the 1920s and the British theatrical renaissance of

1.1.3.1 Theatre after World War I: Nationalism and Naturalism

(1980). Luscombe’s work proved prescient, as many dominant strands of the

reproduction (surplus value), and the reproduction of the patriarchal order.

1.2 About James Reaney

1.2.1 James Reaney’s Life

1.2.2 James Reaney’ Career

Chapter Two James Reaney’s Trilogy The Donnellys

2.1 Plot Synopsis of the Donnelly plays

2.1.1 Sticks and Stones

2.1.2 The St. Nicholas Hotel

2.2 The Main Themes of The Donnellys

enemies and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.” It is interests that

Terrible and filthy as the name of Blackfoot is—worse than scab, or

In memory of Alfred Scott Garrett (1905-1964), the first historian of

Chapter Three Main Artistic Features of The Donnellys

3.1 Documentary Theatre

3.1.1 Clear the Ground

through to European medieval mystery plays, Elizabethan England and

documentary information is presented in a deliberately obtrusive manner,

information the convey….The matter of the documents here serves to

The document, in other words, no longer necessarily functions merely as invisible

3.1.2 Staging the Document in The Donnellys

statement to his audience in the introduction of The Donnellys:

his Catholic candidate all the

3.2 Stage Metaphor

3.2.1 Classification of Reaney’s Stage Metaphors

Stage props are used often as carriers of metaphor. However, an object or a

Mrs. Donnelly, he eyes bandaged, dances with Jennie to the gramophone

3.2.2 Paradox in Reaney’s Stage Metaphors

in the darkest day of our need”(ibid 158).

3.2.3 Three Ruling Stage Metaphors

3.3 “Reaney Play”: Reaney’s Contribution to Canadian Drama

His complex symbolic and poetic regional drama defines categorizing.

images; other non-realistic elements such as self-consciously “theatrical” lighting

Chapter Four Tragic Factors Analysis of The Donnellys

4.1 Historical Factors — Biddulph Township Feud

4.1.1 War of Land

4.1.2 Social Violence

his friends stole the witness papers from the courthouse.

4.1.3 Religion and Faction Conflicts

The quotation exactly corroborates James Reaney’s comment on the violence

4.2 Personal Factors

abstract idea concrete

Chronology of James Reaney

《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析魏秀娟

《唐纳利一家》之艺术特色及悲剧因素分析魏秀娟