Paper Trails

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With Marina Endicott’s background as actor, director and playwright, it’s not surprising that she would turn to the stage for her latest novel. The subject matter, though, came more by chance than by design.
   
"I was slightly interested in vaudeville," Endicott says. "If I thought of it at all, I thought of it as a slightly tawdry American tradition.
   
"Then I came across photos of Canadian vaudevillians. The acts looked so vulnerable. The photos were beautiful and I got intrigued."
   
The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada) follows three performing sisters, Aurora, Clover and Bella Avery, and their stage mother, from their entry into vaudeville in 1912 to beyond the First World War. Building their careers in theatres across Western Canada and the United States, including Winnipeg’s famed Walker Theatre, the sisters meet eccentric performers and slippery impresarios.
   
Unfamiliar to most people nowadays, vaudeville was once a staple of entertainment, with its acrobats and animal acts, actors and elocutionists. Endicott has filled her novel with the songs they sang and the jokes they told. "Because vaudeville has vanished so completely, the reader has to learn as the girls do," she says.
   
"I didn’t make up the jokes," she adds. "Those are all authentic."

• • •
   
John Hirsch came to Winnipeg in 1947, a teenager orphaned by the Holocaust. Before he died of AIDS in 1989, he had directed plays in Stratford, Toronto, New York and Los Angeles; ran CBC’s drama department for four years; and created the model for regional theatre in Canada when he co-founded the Manitoba Theatre Centre.
   
He’s the subject of A Fiery Soul (Vehicule Press), a new biography by Fraidie Martz and Andrew Wilson. Drawing on numerous interviews, they trace Hirsch’s development as a director. They also explore his tempestuous private life and the closeness he felt to his adoptive Winnipeg family.
   
Loved and hated, sometimes at the same time, Hirsch yelled at actors, blew budgets and put on very good plays. The authors capture both his mad genius and his gawky charm.
   
Martz and Wilson will launch A Fiery Soul at MTC’s Tom Hendry Warehouse on Sunday, Jan. 29 at 5:30 p.m. Famed actor Seana McKenna will be in attendance to talk about her experiences working with Hirsch.