Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL) in southern Ontario sits on the shores of Lake Ontario, and the historic old town is known for its tree-lined, flower-filled streets and the Shaw Festival. The 2023 Shaw Festival season, which runs until early October, features more than a dozen plays and musicals.
The two George Bernard Shaw plays included in this season’s productions, The Apple Cart and Village Wooing, were this visitor’s favorites.
Shaw’s The Apple Cart, written in 1928, nearly 100 years ago, is remarkably timely. Eda Holmes, the play’s Director, notes that Shaw in 1928 imagined England forty years into the future where “the population has become so comfortably middle class on the back of cheap offshore labour that no one even votes or pays any attention to what the government is actually doing.” Shaw’s focus on a global conglomerate Breakages Ltd that “fully infiltrated the British parliament eliminating all opposition in the government to its capitalist agenda” is remarkably prescient. According to Holmes, Shaw foresaw “transnational corporations taking control of governments around the world.”
Shaw’s very entertaining one act play, Village Wooing, first produced in 1934, reminded this theater goer of Wendell Berry’s concern for the need of Americans to put down roots and connect to a community that nurtures its “home.” Caroline Petruzzi McHale’s succinct essay on The Philosophy of Wendell Berry: making agriculture and culture an enduring part of our life on this earth emphasizes Berry’s rejection of a society that runs on money and greed. That theme reverberates with this season’s two Shaw plays at the Festival in NOTL.
When traveling, our coffee directory, which now has nearly 100 listings of coffee roasters, coffee shops and cafés across the United States and Canada, comes in handy. On a visit last year to the Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Shaw Festival, I noted the pleasure of getting the wheels going with a morning mug of coffee from Balzac’s Coffee Roasters’ café, steps away from the Shaw’s Festival Theater. Return visits to Balzac’s were again a pleasure this year.
Although this coffee drinker normally opts for single origin coffee, none of the packaged coffees at the Balzac’s NOTL café for take-away included single origin coffee (though a mug of freshly brewed and delicious Guatemalan Antigua light roast was available at the café). Nonetheless, I opted to remember this recent trip to NOTL by bringing home a package of Balzac’s Coffee Roasters’ Organic Atwood Blend.
Balzac’s partnered with Canadian author and bird lover Margaret Atwood to create its Organic Atwood Blend, “a Smithsonian Institution certified Bird Friendly blend to help raise funds and awareness for Pelee Island Bird Observatory.”
The Smithsonian Institution developed the world’s first and only 100% shade-grown and 100% organic coffee certification: Bird Friendly® Coffee. This seal of approval ensures tropical “agroforests” and the critical habitats they provide migratory birds are preserved. There are now more than 1150 growers of Bird Friendly® coffee worldwide.
Situated in the western end of Lake Erie, Pelee Island Bird Observatory is a non-profit organization devoted to the study and conservation of migratory birds and its purpose is “to collect and disseminate data that will help understand changes taking place in the population of migratory birds.” Bravo!
(Frank W. Barrie, 9/18/23)
