Charles Haines
Bill Glassco's angry little review (Fall 1990) of the Benson-Conolly Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre contains one serious mistake and one saddening implication. They appear in the same sentence:
What can one say about a theatre culture that has failed to produce a native-born director of sufficient vision and expertise to guide either of its two principal theatres, the Shaw and Stratford festivals?
The mistake is obvious. Jean Gascon was native-born and did 'guide'
the Stratford Festival as its Artistic Director from 1969 to 1974. I'm
sure Glassco knows this, and the sentence is, to an extent, the victim
of editorial mismanagement.
What is saddening is Glassco's perhaps intentional use of 'native-born.' Though citizens and long-time residents of this country, will such as Newton, Henry, and Neville be pointed at as lesser creatures by Glassco because they were not in fact born within Canada? One had hoped that most of us had matured past that dangerous point.
August 8, 1991