Schoolhouse is my most-produced play and still going strong, and that surprises me. Urban theatres tend to assume that anything about rural people is sentimental/unsophisticated (I’m still reading condescending reviews about the expressionist classic that was a touchstone for this piece, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.) Moreover, the play’s cast size (10+ with doubling) has long been prohibitive for professional producers. Yet it has been embraced by dozens of conservatories, schools, and community theatres as well as by a decent number of professional companies, across Canada and as far away as Austin, TX and Fargo, SD.

This spring, Schoolhouse will be directed by Aaron Jan in a student production at the Randolph College of the Performing Arts in Toronto, ON.

This summer, it is returning to its roots… and mine. 20 years after its Blyth Festival premiere, and 19 years after the 4th Line Theatre’s landmark production by Kim Blackwell, Schoolhouse is coming back to the 4th Line Theatre in a brand-new production directed by Monica Dottor.`This is where it all began, with a residency in Millbrook that saw 4th Line founder Rob Winslow ferrying my burdensome non-driving self around Cavan Township and Peterborough, to museums and archives and research interviews and 4th Line’s patented “community soundings” where local people shared their stories of their years in the one-room schools and many of their recollections ended up in the play. I so admire what Rob and Kim and their teams have built in Millbrook ON: not community theatre, not the usual band of itinerant professionals with no connection to the terrain on which they work, but a high-level rural professional theatre deeply anchored in its community and place, both onstage and off.

I am looking forward to introducing this story to a new generation… ten miles from the village where I grew up.