The Canadian “elbows up” attitude was showing. Driving through the countryside from Toronto, we noticed it everywhere, in the nicest northerly way. Maple leaf flaglets fluttering from car windows. “True North Strong” yard signs. Banners suggesting, as if in code, “Never 51.”
But once we arrived at the Stratford Festival, situated among the rolling plains of southwestern Ontario, the gloves came off. Though the season was planned well before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, this year’s productions at the country’s (and likely the continent’s) largest nonprofit theater seemed to be sending a message. The message was clearest in the three gripping Shakespeare productions I saw during a six-day, seven-show visit. But “Annie,” no less than Lady Macbeth, had something to say to Canada’s neighbor to the south.
Until experiencing those Shakespeares in quick succession here, I had never deeply absorbed how so many of the canonical plays are set in motion by the same chaotic figure: a man temperamentally unsuited to the wise use of great power. In “Macbeth” he is the quick-rising warrior whose wobbly personality (and overcompensating wife) bring on a blood bath of internecine carnage. In “The Winter’s Tale” he is Leontes, the king of Sicily, whose insecurity results in civil chaos. Likewise, Duke Fredrick, in “As You Like It,” having usurped his sibling’s throne, falls prey to fits of Freudian malice that send his country’s best people into exile.
No matter that “Macbeth” is a tragedy, “The Winter’s Tale” a romance and “As You Like It” a comedy. Regardless of genre, all are warnings. And though some suggest the possibility of reconciliation and recovery, not one offers a reliable map.
Certainly not “Macbeth.” (You can’t reconcile with a corpse.) Stratford’s production, directed by the chic avant-gardist Robert Lepage, imagines Banquo, Macduff and the others as members of a motorcycle gang during the Quebec Biker War of the 1990s, their clan affiliations displayed on the backs of their leather jackets. Macbeth has a greasy salt-and-pepper Prince Valiant; his lady is a groupie in a Bonnie Raitt wig. They live in a roadside motel where a mopey cleaner must mop up the blood. The witches’ cauldron is an oil canister.
That’s all pungent, stylish and a little silly; the thanes gliding their semifunctional motorcycles across the stage look like foosball figurines. But Lepage gives great magic: When Macbeth famously wonders, “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” there really is one, floating in virtual space. And I’ve never seen the play’s marital folie à deux as sickeningly rendered as it is here, by Tom McCamus and Lucy Peacock. Swapping their insanities along with their spit makes them equals in iniquity if nothing else.
Yet Lepage’s contemporizing — he stages Banquo’s murder as a gasoline immolation — has a paradoxical effect on a story that usually devolves into slasher excess. The bikers become a bloc, the pileup of deaths more political than personal. In this context, Lady M.’s “Out, damned spot!” is no longer a matter of mere hygiene: It’s a plea to erase the havoc of recent history.
If “The Winter’s Tale” is less bloody, with just two fatalities, it’s still recognizable in Antoni Cimolino’s haunting production as a story linking failed manhood to a failed state. With women reduced to trophy wives, despised dissidents or half-discarded daughters, there is no stay on the king’s impulsiveness, which in Graham Abbey’s lucid performance suggests a form of arrested development. He pouts like an adolescent.
No motorcycles here; the costumes are Greco-Roman and the magic is emotional. But modest means are sufficient for Cimolino, in his second-to-last season as Stratford’s artistic director, to drive home a big point: Though wayward nations are sometimes salvageable, it is never without grave loss. In this case the salvage happens mysteriously, through unaccountable self-reform and magic.
The loss, though, remains painfully clear. Making relatively little of the demise of a royal adviser — “exit, pursued by a bear” is the famous stage direction — Cimolino spends the stage’s full capacity for pathos on a final image of the king’s son, who dies as a casualty of his father’s volatility.
In outline, “As You Like It” seems to follow the same path, from chaos to order by way of “Hee Haw.” (Both plays make tiresome detours into hayseed high jinks.) The version directed here by Chris Abraham has an environmental theme, contrasting the luxurious corruption of Duke Frederick’s court with the healthful thrift of his exiles in the forest. The heroine’s bridal dress is an upcycled IKEA bag.
Despite the green gloss and the de rigueur quadruple wedding, “As You Like It” has a sting in its tail. Yes, Duke Frederick eventually decides to cede power to his usurped sibling. But why? All we are told, by an Act V messenger, is that he “was converted” by an “old religious man” — a scene I wish we could see. Failing that, we are left to wonder if there is any practical recourse to the despotism Shakespeare so memorably characterizes in these plays as an arachnid infestation: Macbeth with his mind “full of scorpions,” Leontes having “drunk, and seen the spider.”
Perhaps it’s not theater’s highest purpose to serve as a moral GPS. Stratford’s pairing of the 1977 musical “Annie” with a family-friendly adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables” turns out to be a brilliant compare-and-contrast opportunity in that regard, and a probably inadvertent sally in the Canada vs. U.S. squabble. Both feature upbeat redheaded orphans who start in dire circumstances and wind up in wonderful homes. But what looks dire and what looks wonderful to the American Annie and the Canadian Anne could not be more different.
Seen today, “Annie,” in a crowd-pleasing staging by Donna Feore, is somewhat shocking. Despite allusions to Depression Hoovervilles, its portrait of poverty is relentlessly jaunty, a common problem in musicals. (Lyrics about childhood cruelty probably shouldn’t be this delightful: “No one cares for you a smidge / When you’re in an orphanage.”) And did we never notice that, despite her pluck and aplomb, the moppet’s happy ending is completely the result of accidental intercession by, as it happens, a president of the United States and a Republican billionaire? The billionaire’s servants sell Annie on life in his Manhattan mansion with promises of satin sheets and tennis lessons.
On Prince Edward Island, where Anne comes to live in the house with the gables, success depends on hard work, not luck, and the ending is bittersweet. Her adoptive parents are spinster brother-and-sister farmers, not prone to exuberance; the luxuries they offer are quiet companionship and ethical guidance. In Kat Sandler’s adaptation, which moves some of the action to the present tense to suggest its timelessness, sadness is neither suppressed nor dwelt on. Poverty, if not exalted, is honorable. Anne becomes a teacher.
Is it overreaching to note that the musical is content to leave Annie, the American, merely an heiress? As if the point of striving were luxury, and the world’s fate is best left to the whims of the powerful?
If so, blame Stratford. Especially in a season as strong as this one, the themes overflow their banks and flood your impressions of everything you see. Even the excellent revival of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” directed by Tracey Flye, seems to have read the memo. It may be one of the funniest musicals ever written, but it’s still about irredeemable American con artists.
Cons and kings tend to have the upper hand onstage. But if neither Shakespeare nor the lighter fare I saw this season offer suggestions for progress and reconciliation, I did find two hopeful blueprints in Stratford — one in a play and one in the town’s central square.
The play’s title — “Forgiveness” — tells you exactly what its blueprint suggests. Adapted by Hiro Kanagawa from a memoir by Mark Sakamoto, and given a gripping production by Stafford Arima, it concerns two Canadian citizens, alike in bitterness, during and after World War II. One, Mitsue Sakamoto, is relocated to civilian internment camps along with her family, where they are subjected to vile conditions and forced labor. The other, Ralph MacLean, a soldier confined to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, is physically and psychologically tortured by a sadistic commandant. By a stroke of chance that would seem preposterous if it weren’t true, his daughter and one of her sons fall in love, requiring the families to master their anger and grief, and make peace.
How did this “Romeo and Juliet,” though filled with brutality, find a happy ending? (The memoir’s author is a grandson of Mitsue and Ralph.) One crucial ingredient is the characters’ willingness to see silent solidarity in their shared sense of injury. Pain recognizes pain, if you let it.
The other ingredient is time.
So if Canadians despair about the doings across the border, some are building the long path forward. Dropping by a coffee shop for a cold drink on a hot day mid-trip, I noticed a sign by the cash register: “If you are American, then we are friends. Tell us you’re visiting!”
It turns out that an anonymous Canadian benefactor was covering the cost of all orders for U.S. patrons. Sometimes, the iced mocha is mightier than the sword.
Stratford Festival
In repertory, with staggered closing dates through Dec. 14 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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