Death of Patricia Joudry

[awagner]

Pioneering playwright and writer on spirituality Patricia Joudry passed away quietly in Powell River, B.C. on October 28, 2000, ten days after her 79th birthday.

Joudry was the first Canadian playwright, already in the 1950s and early 1960s, to have her work produced on radio, television and the stage in Canada, the U.S. and England. In 1957 she shared the Woman of the Year Award with Gabrielle Roy as Canada's outstanding woman in literature and art. In the 1990s, her spiritual study Twin Souls, co-authored with Maurie Pressman, was published in Canada, the U.S., England, Australia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Brazil.

Patricia Joudry was born in Spirit River, Alberta, on October 18, 1921 and began acting with Dorothy Davis' Children's Theatre in Montreal at the age of 15. She sold her first radio play (for $50) to the CBC before she was 19. In Toronto she wrote and starred (at $75 a week) in the CBC radio series "Penny's Diary" broadcast nationally from 1940 to 1943. The popular situation comedy about a teen-age girl and her family won Joudry a seven-year contract (at a starting salary of  $25,000 a year) in 1945 to co-author "The Aldrich Family" in New York. The series was the highest paid radio comedy program in North America. Joudry was just twenty-four years old. 

After four years with "The Aldrich Family," Joudry returned to Canada in order to pursue more serious dramatic writing for CBC radio and television. Andrew Allan and Esse Ljung produced six of her one-hour radio dramas on the CBC Stage series from 1951 to 1956. She also had four television dramas produced on the CBC from 1953 to 1957. When Andrew Allan first produced Joudry's drama Teach Me How to Cry as a sixty minute radio play on CBC Stage April 19, 1953, Joudry herself and Don Harron played the two young lovers. Henry Kaplan's October 13, 1953 CBC Theatre television version starred Toby Robins, Neil Vipond, Kate Reid, John Drainie, Murray Davis, and Eric House.

By 1954 Joudry had written over 250 radio scripts but found no professional Canadian theatres interested in her work. The Crest Theatre in Toronto turned down Teach Me How to Cry, her most successful drama, subsequently staged off-Broadway in New York in 1955. Brooks Atkinson praised the play in the New York Times and Universal-International Studios bought movie rights for $25,000.

Joudry was divorced from her first husband Delmar Dinsdale in 1952. Assisted by her second husband, the photographer John Steele, as producer, she attempted to finance the staging of her plays in Toronto but was unsuccessful and moved to England in 1957. There Steele produced a successful five-week run of Teach Me How to Cry, with an all-Canadian cast directed by Leon Major, in 1958, the first all-Canadian production to play the London West End. In England, Joudry wrote the drama Semi-Detached about the prejudice of an English-Canadian household in Montreal against a French-Canadian family living in an adjoining home. The play was again rejected by the Crest Theatre and Gratien Gelinas' Comedie-Canadienne in Montreal but was bought by Broadway producer Phillip Rose in 1959. Warner Brothers purchased film rights for $100,000. After a month-long tour, Semi-Detached closed after a few performances on Broadway in March of 1960. Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times that in America "our racial prejudices have different faces."

Unable to make a consistent living from her playwriting, Joudry and her five daughters often struggled with dire poverty in England in the 1960s. With John Steele, she transformed a dilapidated fourteenth century English farmhouse in the Cotswold Hills of England into an alternative "free" school, constantly battling creditors and the conformist nature of compulsory public school education. For a decade her home Shornhill also became a spiritual centre where Joudry explored eastern religions, radionics, spiritualism and transcendental meditation. During this period she wrote dozens of experimental and metaphysical plays "transmitted" to her from the beyond by authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, O'Neill, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie and Willa Cather.

Joudry returned to Canada in 1973 after creditors finally closed down Shornhill. Tundra Books published two autobiographical accounts about her experiences in England, And the Children Played and Spirit River to Angel's Roost: Religions I Have Loved and Left. Joudry's artistic and spiritual search is also reflected in her fiction. McClelland and Stewart published The Dweller on the Threshold in 1973 and her three-generation Prairie novel, The Selena Tree in 1980. Joudry's finest realistic novel, The Selena Tree portrays the tragic struggle for survival, realized only two generations later, by an artist in a small Prairie frontier town in the early 1900s.

By the time she returned to Canada, Joudry's style of comic writing and spiritual themes failed to interest the newly emerging Canadian professional theatres of the 1970s and 1980s. Her comedy A Very Modest Orgy, produced by 25th Street Theatre in Saskatoon in 1981, was her first stage play to receive a production in Canada in twenty-four years. Shortly before her death, Joudry was gratified to see the republication of Twin Souls by Hazelden in the U.S. Her vast reincarnation novel The Continuing City, in which four pairs of separated lovers search for each other over eons of time, and her recently completed autobiography My Life as Patricia Joudry are as yet unpublished. 

Joudry's ashes were scattered by her daughter Rafaele on the seashore of her writing cabin overlooking the ocean near Powell River. In addition to Rafaele, she is survived by her four other daughters Gay, Sherry, Stefania, and Felicity. 

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