David Ferry: Blackfeet to
In the Donnellys
Trilogy, James Reaney evolves his
physical staging patterns, language structure, and choral sequences to
mirror
the developing social, political and economic sophistication of the
Irish
Canadian Community of South Western Ontario (specifically Biddulph).
The plays
parallel the growing antipathy towards the Donnelly ‘clan’ from 1840 to
1880, as
the community evoles from a settler farming economy through
commercial entrepreneurship to a
structured regional power base rooted in the political and church
establishments. Exclusion and equity are central themes in these plays,
and the
physical, political, and social environments that the Donnellys
overcome
paradoxically commit them to their fiery-furnace deaths. The lonely
farm boy
poet of The Red Heart, the young girl of The Box Social,
the
sickly boy of Listen to the Wind all prepare the way for the
defiant
Donnelly (Père et Mère) standing up against the
conformist establishment.
Individualism is life. Conformism is death.