John Herbert

Writer's History
Bio - John Herbert
Writen - John Herbert 2001

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First Short Stories Published - Children's Magazine 'Wee Wisdom' (published in Kansas City, MO, USA.)
1940 'A Boy and His Queen' is set in time of Elizabeth 1st about a wandering minstrel boy who meets the 'Good Queen Bess' when she hears him singing into the streets, of London.
1941 The Chinese Proverb' is a contemporary story about a Chinese-Canadian boy who survives the prejudice and bigotry of his classmates through his skill for a love of painting.
1942 'Dawning', a poem about the futility of war. Herbert's first poem published in 'York Memo', the annual school magazine of York Memorial Collegiate in west-end of Toronto.
1944-45 Studied painting at Ontario College of Art.
1945-47 Worked in art department of Eaton's advertising department (sixth floor).
1947 Arrested by police and charged with 'gross indecency': sentenced to six months at Guelph Reformatory (Ontario).
1948 to 1952 Travelled Canada, working and living in northern Manitoba, northern Quebec and Montreal, Excursions to the USA, as well living a while in Chicago.
1953 Travelled across Canada as a professional female impersonator together with Alan Maloney (known as 'Brandy') in a show called 'Paris After Midnight', a kind of burlesque, part of Model Shows a circus-size carnival company.
1955 Studied in Toronto. Settled down for three years in Dora Mavor Moore's theatre school 'New Play Society' to study acting, directing, lighting, costuming, stage management and set designing. Worked part-time for Dora as actor, set designer, stage manager and prop person. Did technical work for production of N.P.S.'s annual stage revue, 'Spring Thaw'.
1958 Worked with dancer Bianca Rogge's dance company at Village Playhouse and in First Canadian Modern Dance Festival for Bianca Rogge and Judy Jarvis.
1959 Herbert read a collection of his poems, on the theme of homosexuality, at the Bohemian Embassy Coffee House, which was the first such reading in Toronto.
1961 Directed 'Adventure Theatre Company' in a production of Enid Bagnold's 'The Chalk Garden' at Centre Stage (where the Bloor Street Bay store now sits.
1962 Directed Adventure Theatre in a production of James M. Barrie's 'Dear Brutus' at St. Luke's Auditorium.
1962 Herbert produced two of his early one-act plays 'Private Club' and 'A Household God' at Bohemian Embassy Coffee House with his company the New Venture Players.
1963 Invited to perform the same two original plays at the 'Newmarket One-Act Play Festival', in Newmarket, Ontario.
1964 Adapted and produced A. Dumas' play, 'The Lady of the Camellias' at Victoria Auditorium, Queen and Victoria Sts., Toronto, with the New Venture Players.
1965 Produced and directed Jean Genet's 'The Maids' at John Herbert's Garret Theatre, on the floor above Rugantino's Restaurant on Yonge Street, near Charles St. This was the first presentation of a Genet Play in Toronto; Critic Nathan Cohen attended.
1965 Douglas Campbell, co-directed with John Hirsch at Stratford that year, chose John Herbert's new play 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' to be acted by Stratford's Young Company in workshop, with Bruno Gerussi directing. In the cast were Richard Monette and Ken James, among others.
1967 Nathan Cohen, of the Toronto Star, sends 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' to David Rothenberg, young producer of 'Viet Rock' Off-Broadway in New York. David opens "Fortune and Men's Eyes' at Actor's Play house, where it runs for a year.
1971 John Herbert closes the Garret with a new play by Ivan Burgess, a young musician - writer from Western Canada, a black Canadian. Ken Gass, also from Western Canada, directed 'Horseshoe House'. It was his first directing work in Toronto. The production and play received excellent reviews and had a second run later at the Library Theatre. Gass went on to found 'The Factory Theatre' on Dupont St. where David Freeman's play 'Creeps' was born.
1971 John Herbert donated everything from the Garret Theatre to Ken Gass' new theatre The Factory, lights, costumes, chairs, platforms, etc., and Herbert leaves for Paris, France, where his play 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' opens on December 22nd, 1971, at the Theatre Athenee (Moliere's Last theatre) to rave reviews and a nine-months run in the 'city of light'. French translation was by Alain Brunet, who simply called the play 'Hommes' (Men) for the Paris performance.
1971 The M.G.M. released film of 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' opened in the USA and Canada and at the 'Venice Film Festival' in Italy. The Italian critics praised the film highly. Direction was by Harvey Hart (a Canadian in Hollywood) with film script by John Herbert, author of the original stage play. (The film script was worked on through 1968 and 1969 until approved by M.G.M. executives, who by contract with John Herbert could not employ a different writer - a difficult kind of contract to obtain, since Hollywood likes to alter everything.) The movie still shows on television every year around the world and is available for rental at most video rental outlets.
1971-72 John Herbert remains in Paris and London for a year, studying French and British theatre with renewed curiosity and enthusiasm.
1972-73 - John Herbert returns to Canada with a completed new play script, 'Born of Medusa's Blood', which open in an equity production at 'Theatre-in-Camera', with an all-black actors cast, led by Jazz-singer and actress Jodie Drake.
1973 'Born of Medusa's Blood' receives mixed review in Toronto. The Toronto Star's David McCaughna, a stringer for the paper, gives the production a good review, but a week later, Urjo Kareda, the Star's new drama critic (after Nathan Cohen's death) returns from New York coverage of the American theatre scene to deny McCaughna's approval of 'Medusa' with what is probably the most vicious review on record by a Canadian drama critic of a Canadian artist's work. As well as attacking Herbert's writing, Kareda attacks Jodie Drake's physical appearance in an excess of verbal brutality. All other reviewers in newspapers and magazines highly praised Jodie Drake's performance of the character 'Clio', no matter what they thought or said of Herbert's writing. Since physical appearance had been made fair game by Kareda, when Herbert encountered Karada at a different theatre opening, Herbert said to Karada in full earshot of theatregoers, "The Star in Cohen's day, had a large critic. Now, it has only a fat one."
1974 A production of John Herbert's four one-act plays "Pearl Divers', 'Beer Room', 'Close Friends' and 'Dinosaurs' is staged at the Forest Hill Library Theatre on Eglinton Ave. West under the umbrella title 'Some Angry Summer Songs' (later published by Talonbooks of Canada and USA). The 'Maverick Theatre' is born in this first production of those plays.
1974 John Herbert's three-act play 'Omphale and the Hero' is published in Canadian Theatre Review, but had only a workshop production in Toronto. This play was later translated into German by Hildegard Lanman and Edith Platzer of Vienna and London, entitle 'Der Engel Unter Das Volfen'.
1975 Phoenix Theatre of Toronto, under the direction of Graham Harley produces a full Canadian performance of 'Fortune and Men's Eyes', the first such in Toronto, eight years after the play had been seen in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London (England), Sweden, Norway and Tel Aviv, Israel.
  * Note * The 1967 production of 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' in Toronto was the New York cast on tour of Canada.
1975 John Herbert is given the Chalmers Award (listed as awarded in 1976 on the Chalmers site) together with five thousand dollars as result of the Phoenix Theatre production of his prison play.
1976 John Herbert produces, directs and performs the title role in Tennessee Williams' satirical play 'The Gnadiges Fraulein', a wicked comedy on the subject of artistic values in American theatre, Hollywood and in the offices of drama critics and writers' agents. Gina Mallet, an English-born stringer for Time Magazine, arrives in Toronto to take the post of drama critic at the Toronto Star, and gives 'The Gnadiges Fraulein', Tennessee Williams, John Herbert and the Phoenix Theatre absolute shit for doing this strange, mad play. Her headline read, "Good Heavens, John Herbert!" She was especially angry about the Journalist, Polly, a character in the play, once a society reporter, who now writes only obituaries of famous people. Mallet wrote of Graham Harley's very comic performance, "Maggie Smith should sue."
1977 'The Wonderful Whores', a topical revue written and performed by John Herbert and his Maverick Theatre Company at the Poor Alex Theatre, which played for four weeks.
1978 'The Great Schmaltz', a takeoff, on the 1939 movie 'The Great Waltz' with a Canadian setting and a story about the plight of a young Canadian musician who wants to become the 'Schmaltz King' of American music.
1979 'The Token Star', a three-act comedy by John Herbert, set in an Ontario town called 'Fallstaff', where a British director has been hired to show Canadians how to play 'Shakespeare'. To get grants, he must employ one internationally known Canadian performer as he hires British stars to form his company. He chooses the Quebec actress, 'Monique Dominique', the rage of Paris, whom he believes speaks only French. When she arrives at the 'Falstaff Festival', she gives the British director the shock of his life and she refuses to play supporting parts.
1980 - 'Hollywood, Here?' a satirical revue posing the question "What if Canada had become the movie capital of the world, instead of California?" (After all, the first theatre where audiences paid to see movies [made in Canada] in North America was located in Montreal, Quebec, early in the Twentieth Century. Locally, filmmakers could not persuade Canadian businessmen to risk investment in this new art form.) So, Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler went south to the USA, together with some filmmakers who did very well in Hollywood. In 'Hollywood, Here?' there was lots of mad drag, a tall blonde girl with long legs doing wild John Wayne, a short saucy man doing both a hilarious Mae West and a neurotic Bette Davis, who smoked six cigarettes at the same time. The Shirley Temple child star was a black actor, as cute as a button, in blonde curls. The production was great fun.
1982 'The Power of Paper Dolls', a three act comedy about three older women who travel Europe, meeting there, and learning about their real lives while having this last crazy fling. Written by Herbert, work shopped by the Maverick Company, performed by the Autumn Leaf Company in tandem with The Smile Company at the Alumnae Theatre, with direction by Thom Sokoloski.
1983 'Magda', a play in two-acts by John Herbert, directed by Thom Sololoski, and performed at the Adelaide Court Theatre in a production by the Autumn Leaf Company. The play ran for five weeks to good houses, after favorable reviews in all but the Globe and Mail. Ray Gonlogue hated the play, or John Herbert, or both. The play was about and based on the life of an aging woman, a survivor, of the concentration camp, who is on trial in Berlin of today for taking an act of revenge on the Nazi who killed her family.
1984 The Butterfly and the Nightingale', was written by John Herbert for the children at St. Paul's Community Centre (Roberts St. and Bloor) who crept into rehearsals of Maverick Theatre productions trying to join in the action. Amazingly, the parents, attending with the kids, laughed harder than the children, who were more inclined to believe everything that was happening on stage. The play is about a madly selfish rich family, royal in fact, whose members manage to foul up one another's lives. The heroine is the gardener's daughter, in love with flowers, birds, bees and butterflies, and the hero is a shepherd who wants to save the woods and the fields for the animals which have always made their home in that setting. The greed and exploitation of nature by the rich family almost win, but a personal sacrifice by the gardener-father saves his daughter and the shepherd.
1985 'The Biographers', a three-act play. Developed in workshop by Maverick Theatre at St. Paul's Community Centre, but never given a public performance. The play is John Herbert's comment on the waywardness and unpredictability of a life in the theatre.
1986 - The Maverick Theatre Company moves into 519 Community Centre, at 519 Church Street and worked there till 1996.
1987 Maverick revives the play for children 'The Butterfly and the Nightingale' by John Herbert, and performs it for the community centre's 'Summer Camp in the City' program, where children from various center-city recreation centers come together in the 519 auditorium.
1988 Maverick Theatre, under the shared directorship of Suzanne Charlton and John Herbert, presents three Tennessee Williams one-act plays under the umbrella titles 'The World of Tennessee Williams', with a benefit performance for 'Gay Pride Day', funding of the annual event.
1989 'The Hungry, The Homeless and The Hopeful' - umbrella title for a program of three one-act plays from the Nineteen-thirties in America plays, which could have been written about Toronto of today. One of the plays, 'Hope is the thing with Feathers', examines the plight of a group of homeless people, living in a public park and desperately hunting for food. Herbert and Charlton directed. The other two one-act plays were 'The old Jew' and 'The peddler's Cart'.
1990 John Herbert's Maverick Theatre presents a production of 'Driving Miss Daisy', directed by Suzanne Charlton and performed at 519 Community Centre.
1991-93 Maverick Theatre works on John Herbert's new play script 'Broken Antiques Dolls', a play in two-acts, set in a nursing home, featuring four aged residents of different backgrounds in life, who try to form a family under the critical interference of doctor and nurse.
1994 'Broken Antique Dolls' performed to public at 519 Community Centre, as directed by Suzanne Charlton. This benefit performance was given to help with the funding at Casey House, the hospice for patients with AIDS. (One character in the play fights the condition of AIDS himself.)
1994-95 'Merchants of Bay Street'. Maverick Theatre works on John Herbert's adaptation of 'The Merchant of Venice' by William Shakespeare, which John Herbert has set in Toronto of a hundred years ago (1894) to examine earlier days of racial and religious prejudice in Canada, 19th century roots of many of today's problems in our society. October 27th, 1995, Maverick Theatre performed 'Merchants of Bay Street' in benefit for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in a donated space by Club Colby's, 9 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, called Stage III for the performance.
Library & Archives
1969 The United States Library of Congress gave a special place to John Herbert's play 'Fortune and Men's Eyes' as: "The only American theatre play to have given birth to an actual social reform movement, in the form of 'The Fortune Society', a prison reform organization in America."
1981 The library at the University of Waterloo sought and bought John Herbert's papers, everything written by the author during his lifetime, including earliest stories from childhood. The John Herbert Archives reside in the University of Waterloo's Rare Book Room in Waterloo, Ontario and will be brought up to date by the end of 2001 when John Herbert's estate will turn over his work since 1990 to curator, Susan Bellingham, as Herbert had promised.
John Herberet  



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