The most important thing I learned is that Christopher Plummer is not the only Canadian actor of note trodding the boards. The second is that between plane and rental car from New York City to Buffalo Airport to Stratford, it takes about as long as a drive from my Manhattan apartment to East Hampton, Long Island.

The trigger for my visit was Joanna Glass, a Canadian-born playwright, whose new play Palmer Park was given the distinction of premiering at Stratford on Aug. 16. Happily, we could build in visits to Christopher Plummer in Caesar and Cleopatra and Brian Dennehy in All's Well That End's Well while adding Love's Labour's Lost in the process.

We stayed and dined at the historic Westover Inn in St. Mary's. Only 12 miles from Stratford, it is a Victorian estate in a bucolic setting, on 19 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds. I found Stratford to be a lovely, picturesque un-touristy village, unspoiled by commercialism.

The trip was not totally taken up by the theatre. I was surprised to learn that the quiet, charming town of St. Mary’s sported its very own baseball hall of fame, celebrating Canada’s role in the game. I was able to show off some knowledge about diamond stars from north of the border. Where is Ferguson Jenkins’s glass case, I asked? Sure enough the star pitcher’s Cy Young Award ring was on display. I saw a room devoted to my hero Jackie Robinson, when he played for the Montreal Royals.
On leaving, I thanked our docent for his kindness and predicted that outfielder Larry Walker would soon be inducted, and perhaps some day, Jason Bay of the Red Sox.
 

First up was Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (running through Oct. 4).

This was our first exposure to a Stratford Festival play, and by far the least winning among the four we saw during this maiden journey. L3 is an unremarkable example of one of Shakespeare's earliest comedies. Given the in-jokes that the Globe Theatre's groundlings undoubtedly guffawed over, director Michael Langham must have felt compelled to one-up the Bard with anachronistic sight gags, bawdiness and excessive playing for laughs. It was a bad start.

Opening Night of Joanna Glass's Palmer Park was up next (runs to Sept. 21).

Glass has a peculiar facility for capturing a snatch of history as eyewitness, and transmuting it from coarse reality to pure gold as a piece of stagecraft. Palmer Park returns Glass to the days in which she lived in a middle-to-upper income suburb of Detroit, soon after the city was ravaged by the race riots of 1967. It is a fascinating tableau of a community that tries - truly tries - white and black alike, to invite and nurture what we euphemistically refer to today as "ethnic diversity," the pragmatic ratio being 65/35 white to black in neighborhood and public school alike.

Like a Ken Burns piece on PBS, one is absorbed by the subject, indelibly dispensed, documentary-style, with narrative asides by the individual players, who not always succeed in mining a revelatory performance inherent in the text.

The flesh-and-blood interplay on-stage is augmented by a giant rear screen (at times a scrim), that succeeds intermittently in reinforcing the heated exchange, the fearsome anxiety, the heroic resolve, the warm embrace, the tension that can raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

As the King of France in All's Well that Ends Well (which closed Aug. 23), Brian Dennehy had all the right resources going for him. I was pleasantly surprised that he had such a relatively large role, while performing in a twin bill of O'Neill's Hughie and Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

Credit the rich, beautifully crafted directorial job by Marti Maraden of Shakespeare's so-called "problem play," that in the wrong hands could be hackneyed, given its fanciful plot. Complementing Dennehy is an equally notable performance by Martha Henry.

Still in Stratford, it was now Opening Night for George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (runs through Nov. 8).

Christopher Plummer's regal bearing has never been more in evidence than when he takes the hand of Nikki M. James, a half-century or so his junior, her eyes welling up, and sweeps her magisterially around the thrust stage of the Festival Theatre as the opening-night audience detonates in thunderous applause. Though this was merely the curtain call, I've not experienced a stage moment more enthralling than this stylishly elegant, deferential gesture on the part of Canada's (make that, North America's) greatest actor.

To Plummer's Iago, Lear, Henry Drummond and John Barrymore, add Caesar, the classic Shavian contrarian, as the nonpareil of roles I have been privileged to witness in more than seven decades of theatre-going. And mark this: on Christmas break from college in 1951, I was privileged to see Olivier as Shaw's Caesar opposite Vivien Leigh on the stage of the Ziegfeld Theatre at the matinee in tandem with the couple's Anthony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare that very evening.

Plummer's opening scene sets the tone, in which the conquering Caesar's monologue before a sphinx is interrupted by the sudden appearance of what? - a frightened Nubian slave? No - a coquettish girl, barely out of her teens, who professes her fear of being eaten by a Roman invader. The diverting, toga-clad warrior with self-deprecating remarks about his age and balding pate has a high old time jousting with Shaw's delicious prose, dispensing Henry Higginesque insights and intervening in the monarchal struggle between the child-like Cleopatra and her insipid kid brother Ptolemy.

Credit the Festival's artistic director Des McAnuff, who staged this epic production of Shaw seamlessly, with pitch-perfect wit, and disciplined prose-pruning.

On to Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Prince of Wales lived up to its promise as first-rate hotel in accommodations and dining, proximate to Shaw Festival theatres and shopping.  Its elegant lobby and furnishing reminded me for all the world of its namesake, The Prince de Galles on Avenue George V in Paris.
It was only a half-day drive to Niagara Falls with access to some 17 wineries, one of which we visited and tasted its delicious ice wine.

For a matinee on Aug. 19, my wife and I saw Terrence Rattigan's After the Dance (runs through Oct. 5).

After a heady tasting of the riches of a notable troupe of major-league players in Stratford, I was prepared to adjust to at best a Triple A ensemble at the Shaw Festival. I was swiftly disabused of this miscalculation within the first 10 minutes of a comedy/drama, with which I was totally unfamiliar, though it was written in 1939 by one of my favorite playwrights, Terrence Rattigan, author of The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables. The action is set ominously in Mayfair before Britain's entry in WWII.

Canadians Patrick Galligan as David and Neil Barclay as John Reid would be standouts in any theatrical troupe. The portly actor Barclay, with 19 years under his ample belt at the Shaw Festival, is a consummate player, who blends compassion, loyalty and droll wit. Part Robert Benchley, part Sydney Greenstreet, I would dearly love to see him as Sheridan Whiteside or Falstaff.

That evening it was Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (goes through Nov. 1).

Director Eda Holmes and the entire cast did an exemplary job in making this familiar melodrama about the conniving, mendacious Hubbard brothers, scions of a southern family at the turn of the last century, fresh, brilliantly paced and edge-of-the-seat arresting. Special praise to Laurie Paton as the manipulative Regina. And kudos to David Jansen's Horace Giddens as Regina's out-maneuvering husband, and the marvellous Sharry Flett as Regina's dithering sister-in-law Birdie Hubbard.

What did I learn from this immersion in north-of-the-border theatricals? That Christopher Plummer, great as he is, isn't the be-all or end-all of Canadian stage actors. There are a tantalizing couple of dozen more, deservingly on centre stages.