Death of Marion Andr é

[Leonard Conolly]

Thanks, Anton. It's sad news, but colleagues might like to be reminded 
that many of Marion's achievements have been recorded and preserved in 
collections at Guelph--the Theatre Plus archives and the Marion Andre 
Collection.

Len Conolly


Anton Wagner wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>