I love going to the Stratford Festival during the summer months and August 23 was a two play day for me which is the reason I was not out walking with the TPW group on Saturday. Taking the bus is an easy way to get there (though if anyone has not heard my story of the evening bus that departed Stratford at 11 pm but due to a closure of the 401 Highway, didn’t arrive back in Toronto until 4:15(!) in the morning – be warned!)
The matinee was a performance Forgiveness: A Gift From My Grandparents (based upon the book of the same name). It’s the story of Mark Sakamoto’s grandparents; his grandmother (on his father’s side) raised on the B.C. coast, then relocated during the Second World War to a Japanese internment camp in Alberta and his grandfather (on his mother’s side), born on the Magdalen Islands, and a POW in a Japanese prison camp. You can see the problem: a Japanese/Canadian grandmother badly treated by Canadians and a Scottish/Canadian grandfather badly treated by the Japanese; the first with a son, the second with a daughter, who grow up and fall in love. It’s a remarkable story about our history and the gift these two people who were so badly treated during their lives, were able to give to their children, that all Canadians should see.
The evening performance was a new play by Erin Shields called Ransacking Troy. It has an all female cast of incredibly strong actors and, to quote the synopsis: “imagines a less testosterone-fuelled conclusion [to the Trojan War], in which the women of Greece – tired of waiting for their husbands to return from war – stage an intervention of historical proportions…Up against bloodthirsty warriors, mystical beasts and the capricious will of the gods, these women vow not to be mere footnotes in tales of men”.
It is funny (with the women’s descriptions of men) and smart (about the world they live in) and so powerful in the play’s understanding of our human predilection for warfare.
And how fitting is that for 2025 and the times we are in???
