Festival helps demonstrate the power of live theatre
Perth festival set to kick off seventh season
Good stories well told can move mountains. Matthew Behrens, associate producer of the Classic Theatre Festival in Perth, says he has known this for most of his life.
“As someone who grew up in a political and theatrical family, I learned that people are most likely to change their perspective on an issue through storytelling,” he says. “I also learned from indigenous folks that if you want to learn about the world, you sit and listen to the elders tell their stories.”
He emphasizes that his “real education, whether in the theatre or in the broader world” came in good part through meeting such people as American peace activist and former Roman Catholic priest Philip Berrigan.
“When I was a kid, I would hear my mother say that when she was growing up the great AfricanAmerican singer Paul Robeson stayed at her house,” recalls the son of actors Deborah Cass and Bernard (Bunny) Behrens. “When she was a summer camp director, folksinger Pete Seeger used to come to Canada and play at her camp, while he was blacklisted in the U.S. These people are like demigods to most people on the planet and I was just one step removed (from their influence). Growing up listening to their records and hearing my mother talk with such passion about their vision for the world and how the arts could transform people’s lives was an education you couldn’t buy.”
Little wonder then that he has a continuing commitment to helping others through such causes as working to stop violence against women and supporting efforts to end homelessness.
Then, through his work with the Classic Theatre Festival, he and his wife Laurel Smith, the company’s artistic producer, demonstrate the power of live theatre. The couple, who have run Burning Passions Theatre in Toronto for more than two decades, started their summer theatre festival in Perth in 2010.
“After Laurel spent a year with the Shaw Festival, we began looking for a place to start a summer theatre,” says Behrens. “Southern Ontario was very crowded, so we looked for an area that was not well served (theatrically). A friend gave us a guidebook to Perth and we came out one horrifically cold and icy February day.”
Weather conditions during that first visit aside, “we found Perth a very charming place,” he says. “And when we came back in the spring, we really fell in love with it.”
Thus, the Classic Theatre Festival, now preparing for its seventh season, became a popular theatrical feature in the Ottawa Valley. This year, the season has been expanded to three plays. In addition, it includes two theatrical historic walking tours, The Lonely Ghosts Walk, and, in celebration of Perth’s 200th anniversary, a feature entitled Perth Through the Ages.
“The Lonely Ghosts Walk is going to look at the effects of the production of whiskey and other alcohol on women especially,” says Behrens. “The temperance movement in the early 20th century was very much linked to concerns about violence against women and the use of alcohol to enforce social inequality. Perth Through the Ages will be focused on indigenous stories. As well as being very interesting, they are a reminder that the individuals who founded the military settlement in 1816 were not the first people in the territory. There are lots of different ways of telling these stories so that people will understand and enjoy the history.”