In 2004, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director at New York's Mint Theatre Company, arrived in Niagara-on-the-Lake clutching an envelope and heading for an ostensibly routine chat with Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell.
As they settled into chairs in Maxwell's office, their conversation quickly took an unexpected turn. “I've got a surprise for you,” beamed Bank as he slid his package across the table.
Maxwell opened the envelope, and when she saw its contents, she nearly fell out of her seat. She was in the midst of a hugely successful run of Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Son, and Bank had quietly delivered exactly what she'd been searching for: one of Sowerby's missing plays.
Opening May 23, that photocopied, faded typescript of The Stepmother, a play never performed publicly and all but forgotten, has become the most recent chapter in Shaw's growing tradition of what Maxwell likes to call “archeological programming” – the presentation of lost, forgotten and undiscovered plays, an adventurous strand of the festival's mandate.
Maxwell said her predecessor, Christopher Newton, started the archaeological tradition, and she arrived at Shaw intending to find some lost female playwrights as well.
Since her arrival, the Shaw has uncovered and staged rarely seen plays such as St. John Hankin's The Cassilis Engagement and His Majesty by Harley Granville-Barker.
“Audiences are loving it,” she said. “The thing that I have been very happy about in doing this job is the audiences that come to Shaw … will go and see plays they don't know.”
Theatrical archaeology isn't an exact science. To be successful, Maxwell says, you need the right connections in the field and an instinct for where to dig.
Maxwell corresponds with scholars who search through archives such as those at the British Museum, and she does her own “poking around” wherever possible. When travelling, she takes time to explore used bookstores in search of hidden gems. While rifling through the back of one such store, she found a play by Terence Rattigan entitled After the Dance, which opens at Shaw in June. It's one of his earliest works, and most theatrical encyclopedias don't even list it.
Equally valuable is Maxwell's ongoing correspondence with like-minded directors such as Bank. Although she had been searching for more of Sowerby's works, she never specifically asked Bank about them.
But he was able to unearth The Stepmother through a mixture of diligence and good fortune. Mint Theatre has been mounting lost plays exclusively since 1999, making Bank one of the best-connected hunters. While in conversation with Samuel French, the British publishing firm, about pitching Rutherford and Son to a Hollywood studio, Bank asked if the publisher knew of the whereabouts of Sowerby's lost plays.
Samuel French's performing arts director, Paul Taylor, soon wrote back to say he'd found two in their archives, The Stepmother and A Man and Some Women, and promptly mailed copies to Bank.
“They're just in a box, literally sitting in a box. It's just that someone has to want to shine a spotlight on it and actually have the interest,” Maxwell said.
Extensive research by festival staff suggests The Stepmother was performed only once, in 1924 by the Play Actors, a private club in London. Unusually for a private production, it garnered several newspaper reviews, including one by The Times. Two favourable reviews called for the play to be remounted, but records suggest it never was, giving the Shaw Festival the distinction of staging its public premiere.
Both Bank and Maxwell described The Stepmother as a strong script unmistakably from the same hand as Rutherford and Son, if less grave. Though reminiscent of the period's social realism plays, Maxwell said the dynamics between male and female characters are refreshing. Punctuated by lengthy pauses and silences, the play “sits in discomfort” and explores a palpable, psychological anxiety, Maxwell said.
The Stepmother is appearing at the Court House Theatre, which Maxwell regards as ideally suited to staging lesser-known productions. “You don't put it on the Festival [Theatre] stage because that has different expectations,” she said. “But because we have a space like the Court House, which is a 300-seat, very intimate theatre, people really will go in there and say, ‘Show me.' ”
The plethora of discoveries in recent years promises generations of surprises still to come. Bank said he thinks there is a large reservoir of plays “that were produced successfully once, then just forgotten.”
“A play like Stepmother that has never been published, that exists only in typescript, that has to be sought out – that's digging a little deeper, and I haven't had to do that much yet,” he added.
Maxwell said she has deliberately maintained flexibility in scheduling such pieces, and expects to produce one every couple of years. But she has three or four she is looking to slot into the coming seasons.
“I've got them stacked up like [planes over] O'Hare airport,” she said.
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