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| John Hirsch and the rest of the 1957 Rainbow Stage production staff. |
By, Martin Knelman - Entertainment Columnist
Before she became the biographer of John Hirsch, Fraidie Martz wrote a book called Open Your Hearts. It’s the story of Jewish war orphans from Europe who were admitted to Canada in 1947. There were 500 of them, and Hirsch was the one who became famous — breaking through in, of all places, Winnipeg, and later becoming known around the world as Canada’s greatest theatre director.
He was born Janos Hirsch on May 1, 1930, into a comfortable Jewish family in the Hungarian lakeside town of Siofok. The connection between theatre and real life was clear in one of the things he had been told as a child: every Hungarian is born with Act One in his head, and spends the rest of his life working on Acts Two and Three.
Now a wonderful and long overdue biography by Martz and co-author Andrew Wilson, A Fiery Soul: the Life and Theatrical Times of John Hirsch (Véhicule Press) recounts the second, third and hugely productive fourth acts of Hirsch’s amazing life drama. A life in which, Hirsch used to say, he was “a member of four mafias — Hungarian, Jewish, Winnipeg and homosexual.”
The book brings out the qualities — painful loss, humour, boisterous arguing and big emotions — that defined both Hirsch’s work on stage and his personality offstage.
For Hirsch, Act Two had many good things to savour. In Hungary, he was fond of saying later, theatre was not a frill; it was essential. Hungary had the highest concentration of theatres and cabarets in Europe. But his happy childhood was based on the delusion that things would get better and the threat to the Jews would go away. It ended in tragedy as John’s brother and both his parents perished in the Holocaust.
During the darkest days toward the end of the war, while living with his gentle paternal grandfather, who had been the pillar of his childhood, he asked the old man how he could believe in God given what was happening. His grandfather’s death came as another huge blow. When John tried returning to the family home in Siofok, he found the house ransacked, and realized there was nothing left for him in Hungary.
He left the country and made his way to a UN refugee camp. For a while he planned to join those displaced Jewish survivors waiting to take a boat from Marseilles to Palestine. But, changing his mind, he went to Paris, where he managed to get on the list of 500 Jewish orphans the Canadian government agreed to accept. He picked Winnipeg, because it was always safer to avoid extremes and stay in the middle.
The Shack family in Winnipeg’s north end agreed to take one girl for a limited time, but instead wound up with two boys, including Hirsch, who became a permanent part of the family.
Thus began Act Three.
Wonderful things happened in Winnipeg. He not only learned to speak English and became a top student at the University of Manitoba, he was embraced by the city and supported by philanthropists including Kathleen Richardson.
In the 1950s, Hirsch shook up Winnipeg’s idea of culture. Live professional theatre was a rare commodity in this isolated, wintry place until he exploded on the scene, presenting puppet theatre, then outdoor musicals like Chu Chin Chow at Rainbow Stage.
History was made in 1957 when Hirsch and Tom Hendry started Theatre 77 (because the old Dominion Theatre was 77 steps from the corner of Portage and Main), and again in 1958 when the new company merged with the old Winnipeg Little Theatre to form the Manitoba Theatre Centre — a professional company that became the model for a regional theatre renaissance all across North America.
Then came an unprophesied Act Four, which began when he moved away from his new hometown. Winnipeg was too small to contain this restless, moody and charismatic genius — and to satisfy his ambition. So in the mid-1960s he left, once more becoming a wandering Jew.
He was wooed to direct plays in Stratford, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Israel. By the mid-1970s he was running the drama department for CBC Television, and in the early 1980s he took over as artistic director of the Stratford Festival at a time when it was on the brink of self-destruction.
He had been there earlier, in the mid- to late-1960s, and it was not an entirely happy experience. When he arrived he felt he was reaching the pinnacle of Canadian theatre. Stratford has a great open stage, big technical and financial resources, an international reputation — and mystique. But coming from Winnipeg, Hirsch sensed he had crossed an invisible border. He missed the ethnic diversity, eccentric characters and welcoming embrace of Winnipeg.
“I felt like a stranger,” Hirsch confessed in a memoir.
It was the Star’s celebrated critic Nathan Cohen who explained to Hirsch the trouble with Stratford: “It’s just so goyish!”
During his second stint at Stratford, as artistic director from 1981 through 1985, there were still barriers he couldn’t overcome.
Hirsch accepted the job in Stratford’s darkest hour, when the festival was in danger of collapse. But instead of being regarded as a saviour he was hectored throughout his tenure as an unwanted intruder. To some his greatest sin was that he did things differently.
His predecessor, Robin Phillips, created exciting theatre while staying within the British tradition. Hirsch tried to take Stratford in another direction. His sensibility was more European, more Jewish, more intellectual. To him theatre was a passionate instrument for political debate and social change. Though his appointment was triggered by a wave of Canadian nationalism, Hirsch was at heart an internationalist. And the “good taste” that Stratford often represented was something he needed to challenge.
By then it was clear Hirsch had been doubly exiled — first from Hungary, and then from Winnipeg, where he had picked himself up, brushed himself off and started all over again.
For those who were lucky enough to have experienced the Hirsch effect both on stage and off, he remains a presence even more than 22 years after he died of AIDS in the summer of 1989.
Wherever he landed, and especially in the tranquil setting of the house he shared with Bryan Trottier, his longtime companion, on a beautiful Moore Park ravine, Hirsch always seemed to be trying to recapture the warmth and security of the life he found in Winnipeg. And wherever he went, every Sunday he would phone his stepmother, Pauline Shack, and his stepsister, Sybil Shack.
The last time I saw Hirsch, about a month before he died, he was at home in between hospital bouts. He talked about his bar mitzvah in 1943. It would have been a grander event but the Nazi noose was already tightening, and travel restrictions on Jews prevented many family members from attending, so it was a small, rushed affair in the family’s backyard. He also talked about his beloved grandfather.
As always, Hirsch was in frequent touch with his adopted family. Sybil and Pauline Shack asked what they could send. There were just two things John wanted: their love and their soup.
In the end, Hirsch’s greatest achievement was not so much running big organizations but in the magic he created on the stage. Many people will never forget his 1976 Stratford production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Maggie Smith, Martha Henry and Marti Maraden.
But the production that summed up his whole life was his adaptation of the landmark Yiddish play The Dybbuk, a parable about a bride possessed by the soul of a dead boy who feels she was rightfully his.
Yiddish was not spoken in the Jewish Hungarian world of Hirsch’s childhood, but the material, rich in mysticism, folklore and a sense of cosmic justice, brought something out of him that was simply thrilling. Hirsch staged it at the St. Lawrence Centre in 1974 (after doing it in Winnipeg and before taking it to Los Angeles).
The Dybbuk was his ultimate tribute to the vanished world that propelled him, and it was a beautiful embrace. It was in the flash of this theatrical masterpiece that Hirsch found the links between religion and theatre, between the old world and the new, and between the acts of his own tumultuous life.
Reposted from the Toronto Star on January 21, 2012
