Quote of the Day (Monette)

“You pig! We have spent our lives in this theater. We have given of our time taking care of our art. You talk to us about money all the time. ... You have no morals. I don’t know how you can sleep. I care deeply and passionately about this place, and you must address yourselves to your consciences.” Richard Monette, Canadian actor and director, at the December 1980 annual meeting of the foundation of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, shouting from the audience at the outgoing board president

(I pay tribute today to Monette, who, 12 years after this extremely dramatic outburst, went on to become artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Now it became his lot to deal with money issues. Amazingly enough, he succeeded. By the end of his first season, he had transformed a $1 million debt to an $800,000 surplus, and continued to do so throughout his 14-year run. More than any person associated with the festival since Tom Patterson provided the publicity and organizational spark and Tyrone Guthrie the directorial genius, Monette made his mark on this glittering jewel in Canada’s cultural crown.

But Monette not only enabled the festival to thrive: he brought it to artistic heights it had only reached intermittently before. Among the highlights of his tenure: renovating the Festival and Avon Theaters; establishing the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre; creating a formal program of new play development; adding a fourth venue, the Studio Theatre; and creating a $50-million endowment.

I was lucky enough to see the festival in Monette’s first full season as artistic director. I missed the unexpected hit that became the centerpiece of that year, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (though I saw it on TV, in a production that forever altered how I viewed that play and Eugene O’Neill himself). I did, however, in a little less than a week, see Othello (which, in that post-OJ-in-the-Bronco summer, draw many parallels to contemporary events), Twelfth Night, Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, and The Pirates of Penzance. I couldn’t get over seeing the same actor perform two different roles in the same week—and often, even in the same day.

It wasn’t until much later, talking to other theater aficionados—Canadian natives who knew all the backstage gossip—just how much it took for Monette to keep everything going—how to launch a pet artistic project without bankrupting the place again; how to keep, say, an actress who had long been estranged from the festival from departing in anger again; how to find one play that meshed with the talents of particular directors and actors; how to satisfy competing, clashing egos of all ages; how long to stretch the festival’s season with moneymaking musicals without infringing on how much its actors could make in other, more lucrative productions off-season. (Just as New York actors have an inordinate number of credits for one of the Love and Order series, Stratford actors, at least a decade ago, had an enormous number of credits for Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. They all need something to pay the bills!)

I returned to Stratford three more times over the years, savoring more and more. The last time, in 2001, I attended a theater-enrichment activity, a “Meet the Festival” spotlighting Monette himself. He held forth in droll, the-hell-with-it fashion on such subjects as the current penchant for staging Shakespeare in almost anything but Elizabethan dress (it’s a way of proving the plays are still relevant, he said); his refusal to apologize for musicals that put fannies in the theater (musicals required more diverse skills than nearly any other theatrical form, he said, and to his mind there were really only about a half-dozen truly great ones); and his disdain for the Globe and Mail’s theater critic at the time, Kate Taylor (he was aghast that when she took on her role, she had a background in journalism but not theater).

I have no idea what Monette was like as a person. It seems that he experienced the requisite miserable checkered childhood that so often sees acting as a glorious escape, as well as an Olivier-like bit of stage fright that drove him from an acclaimed acting career into his later, more celebrated career as festival saver. But I can’t imagine the Stratford Festival getting another artistic director so passionate about his work and so canny about getting it noticed.)