Death of Marion Andr é

[Anton Wagner]

Please find below the obituary for Marion André from today's Globe and Mail.


MARION ANDRÉ, THEATRE DIRECTOR 1920-2006
The Holocaust shaped the artistic vision of a Pole who came to Canada and
founded two dynamic theatre companies, writes SANDRA MARTIN. His productions
showcased significant moral and political issues
Marion André was a triple threat in the theatre: a writer, a director and an
impresario. But his greatest contribution was as founding artistic director of
Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Centre and Toronto's Theatre Plus, a company that in
its ambitions was a forerunner of the Soulpepper Theatre Company.
"He was a sparkling ignited soul" and "a real mentor for me," said actress Lynn
Griffin, who performed in A Doll's House, Antigone and The Lark at Theatre
Plus. "He was very demanding to work with," she said, adding she was happy for
the training and discipline he instilled in her because "you can often get by
being really lazy" as an actor. "He challenged himself and everybody around him
to bring their work up to his inspiration."
Calling Mr. André a "very welcoming man with a very generous heart," said Robin
Phillips, former artistic director of the Stratford Festival. What he
remembered was not so much the quality of the productions that Mr. André
mounted at Theatre Plus but the attitude behind them. "There was a real need to
communicate beyond the play," an obsession that Mr. Phillips thinks originated
in the Polish underground theatre where Mr. André worked after the Second World
War -- where the experience of going to the theatre was a much more engaged and
political act than simply being entertained for a couple of hours. "He always
looked behind the easy criticism to a connection and empathy with the intention
of a work."
Marian Andrzej Tenenbaum was born in Le Havre, France, while his Polish parents,
Emil and Renata (née Liebling) Tenenbaum, were studying at the university. After
earning their degrees, the Tenenbaums returned to Lvov in southeastern Poland
(now part of Ukraine), where they worked as pharmacists and had a second child,
Hanka.
After the signing of the German-Soviet pact in 1939 and the subsequent Soviet
invasion of Poland from the east, the Jewish population in Lvov doubled when
100,000 refugees fled from the Nazi onslaught in the west. When the Germans
occupied Lvov after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, the
Tenenbaums' family home and other property were confiscated.
More than 6,000 Jews were killed in Lvov in two pogroms before the Germans
established a ghetto in the northern part of the city in November of 1941. With
the help of Christian friends, Marian obtained false papers for himself and his
mother in the Polish name of Czerniecki, and that enabled them to live outside
the ghetto. He joined the Polish underground and smuggled messages in and out
of the Lvov ghetto (where his father and his sister had been forced to live)
while he was ostensibly collecting scrap metal from the Jews for the German war
effort.
In March of 1942, the Germans began deporting Jews to the Belzec death camp. By
August, more than 65,000 Jews had been transported to the camp and murdered.
Ten months later, the Germans shut down the ghetto, killing many thousands of
people in the process. Marian never found out the fate of his father and
sister, but he always believed they had been killed in the camps.
Passing as a Christian, Marian had escaped the deportations and made his way to
Warsaw, but he was arrested because of his work in the underground and sent to
a German camp. He escaped after the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and was
recruited by the British army because of his linguistic skills in Polish,
German, French and English. By the end of the war, he was in France, where he
learned from the Red Cross that his mother was alive. He returned to Poland,
found her and, together, moved to The Hague in 1946. Working as a cultural
attaché for the Polish legation, he met and married his first wife, a Dutch
woman, with whom he had a son, Tom.
In 1950, they moved to Warsaw, where he began making documentaries and
translating American plays for Polish radio. Three years later, he started a
small children's theatre called Kleks. His marriage broke up and he and his
mother emigrated to Montreal in 1957, sponsored by his uncle.
In Montreal, Marian Andrzej Czerniecki shortened his name to the more masculine
and French-sounding Marion André (a change he legalized in 1980). He found a
series of jobs: helping to establish a drama program for the Protestant School
Board, directing plays on a freelance basis at McGill University, writing for
CBC radio and television and starting a theatre company called Studio Six and
another one called The Freelancers. He also married a second time and had
another son, Krystian.
In 1967, Minda, Phyllis, Edgar and Charles Bronfman, children of Samuel Bronfman
of the Seagram Distillery fortune, established the Saidye Bronfman Centre for
the Arts, as the cultural branch of the YM-YWHA Montreal Jewish Community
Centres, in honour of their mother's 70th birthday. Mr. André was appointed
inaugural director of performing arts and subsequently became executive
director and artistic director. It was at the Saidye Bronfman Centre that he
met Ina Rubin, a dancer and teacher who had been brought in to help with the
dance program. They married in 1970, and he later adopted her two children,
John and Jennifer, from a previous marriage.
After a traumatic youth, Mr. André seemed to be prospering both artistically and
romantically. Coming from Poland, where theatre had always been a forum for
showcasing controversial ideas, he tended to present thought-provoking,
sometimes even disturbing, material about moral and political issues. In 1971,
Mr. André scheduled a production of Robert Shaw's post-Holocaust drama, The Man
in the Glass Booth, a play about the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961 that
raises questions about Jewish passivity as well as dealing with German guilt.
Some Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish Y were deeply offended by
the play's content. There was a huge controversy that manifested itself in
telephone campaigns against the Andrés and others, and threats to torch the
theatre. Afraid of incipient violence and overly sensitive to the feelings of a
survivor's group, the board closed the play before it opened.
Mr. André quit as artistic director in protest because "he felt it was important
that they shouldn't knuckle under to this kind of fear," said Ina, his wife.
"I have nothing but deep feelings of compassion for the victims of Nazi
oppression," Mr. André said in an interview with the Montreal Gazette at the
time. "Theatre must not fear controversy, but consider it a necessary
ingredient of its existence. I have a profound feeling of revulsion when
intimidation is used, or when any group goes to extremes to have its own views
prevail."
The aftermath of the 1970 FLQ crisis added to Mr. André's unhappiness over the
furor at the Bronfman Centre, and he and his family moved to Toronto, where he
was given teaching work in the theatre department at York University. Within a
year, he had seized the opportunity presented by the unused smaller theatre
space at the St. Lawrence Centre in the summer and launched Theatre Plus in
what was then the Jane Mallet, and now the Bluma Appel, theatre. As he said at
the time, "People don't turn their brains off in the summer."
His statement of purpose was to "present plays from a national and international
repertoire that reflect the social, political and moral problems of our times."
Over the next 13 years, he mounted 56 productions, many of them premieres of
modern Canadian, European and American plays. A few of his choices were written
and directed by himself, which caused some critics such as Matthew Fraser to
label him "self-indulgent" and Ray Conlogue to argue that artistic directors
should have to do what every other writer does: "Convince somebody else that
the play is worth producing."
Nevertheless, The Aching Heart of Samuel Kleinerman, a play Mr. André wrote and
directed, was voted the best production of the 1984-85 season by Theatre Plus
subscribers. He was given the Toronto Drama Bench Award for distinguished
contribution to Canadian theatre in 1985, the year that Meniere's disease, a
disorder of the inner ear that causes extreme vertigo and nausea, forced him to
step down. His health continued to trouble him and, by 1988, he needed a
quadruple heart bypass.
Mr. André continued to write, always using the Holocaust, the central experience
of his life, as his theme in novels Maria B. (1990) and The Battered Man (1996),
both published by Mosaic Press. By then, he had been diagnosed with Lewy body
disease, a progressive dementia that is accompanied by hallucinations and has
symptoms similar to both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Eventually, Mrs. André
could no longer care for him; he went into a retirement home, and then a
nursing home.
Marion André was born
in Le Havre, France, on Jan. 12,
1920. He died in Toronto of
complications from Lewy body
disease on May 9. He was 86. He
is survived by his wife, Ina, four
children and six grandchildren.