James Reaney, 1926-2008
Ontario playwright James Reaney died last week at the age of 81. Reaney, who was a poet and a professor as well as a playwright, lived in London, Ontario, and Southwestern Ontario was the backdrop for much of his work. He is best known for his trilogy of plays about “the Black Donnellys,” a family of Irish immigrants in Lucan, Ontario (just outside London) who were massacred by a mob of their neighbours in 1880. The three Donnelly plays – Sticks and Stones, The St. Nicholas Hotel, and Handcuffs – were just reissued in a single volume by Dundurn Press.
