Boyle McCauley News

Since 1979 • April-May 2024 • Circulation 5000

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Things Donne & unDonne in the Summer

Caroline Howarth (left; director) and Karen Simons (playwright). Margaret Marschall

In the year 1631, in the month of March, in the season of Lent, a very sick man named John Donne ordered an urn to be placed in his room and a fire to be lit in the grate behind it. He then wrapped himself in a winding sheet and mounted the urn. Exposing only his face, he stood for his own funeral portrait which an artist painted on a Donne-sized plank of wood. When the painting was complete, Donne had the plank placed in his room where he could see it from his bed as he lay dying.

With this scene, the new play Things Donne & unDonne will open at Edmonton’s Fringe Festival this summer at All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral. I’ll be busy co-producing it and singing in its eight-voice ensemble. In fact, this is my play. Although it is a commissioned work, in honour of the Centennial of the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Bishop Jane Alexander gave me complete liberty. The result: a play in which the life of the poet John Donne (who eventually became an Anglican priest) intersects with the lives of three grad students of our own time. Poetry and Renaissance choral music become the stuff we live – fear, love, grief, and friendship.

Directing the play is Caroline Howarth, co-founder (with Mieko Ouchi) of Edmonton’s multiple Sterling Award winning Concrete Theatre company. Caroline has directed many Fringe shows in the past, including the extremely successful The Fourth Tenor by Boyle Street resident Timothy Anderson. Recently, she and music director Eva Bostrand staged Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval musical drama Ordo Virtutum at All Saints’ Cathedral. Caroline is putting together a great cast for our production. Playing John Donne will be Douglas Tokaryk, known to audiences of past Fringe shows, independent theatre productions, and radio dramas. Samantha Jeffery and Aly Hirji will be playing two of the grad students. Sam, a recent graduate of the BFA acting program at the U of A, has recently performed in St. Joan at Studio Theatre. Aly is currently a theatre student at Concordia University College of Alberta.

Our singers are well-known to audiences of Pro Coro, U of A’s Madrigal Singers, and Jeremy Spurgeon’s Cathedral Choir at All Saints’. They are Sara Brooks (our music director), Catherine Kubash, Wendy Gronnestad-Damur, Rob Curtis, Jeremy Kerr-Wilson, Austin Penner, Anthony Wynne, and me.

Details will soon be available in the Fringe Guide and on the diocesan website at www.edmonton.anglican.org. I hope you’ll check us out!

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