In his article on Playbill, Mark Shenton writes about the sense of continuity at the Stratford Festival, noting that dedication to the Festival is a family affair….and that technology is temporal but theatre is forever.

Here’s a segment from his “A Letter From Stratford.”

“The theatre’s brilliant publicity director Ann Swerdfager’s late father Bruce had been one of the theatre’s founding acting members, appearing in every show for four years before moving on to become company manager and then general manager of the theatre.

And before becoming a full-time theatre person, Bruce had, according to an obituary in the Toronto Star in 2007, held a day job as an office machinery salesman for Remington Rand, and at the end of his first season as a Stratford actor, he once recalled, “I got a big check from Remington Rand even though I was on a leave of absence. It was the commission from a whole room of typewriters I had sold ….. just before I started working at Stratford. It was more money than I’d made all season from the theatre. And I said, ‘Am I crazy? Do I really want to go into this business?’ And I did. When I left my job selling something solid like typewriters to work for something as shaky as the Stratford Festival, everybody thought I was crazy. Well look at things now. Who would have guessed the Stratford Festival would outlast the typewriter?”

Read the full Playbill article HERE.