Whenever You’re Ready: Nora Polley on Life as a Stratford Festival Stage Manager

Actor DeSouza-Coelho’s overlong debut, an as-told-by biography of veteran stage manager Nora Polley and her decades working at the Stratford Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ont., may hold some appeal to hardcore Canadian theater insiders, but even that could be a stretch. The chronological account of Polley’s working life, which DeSouza-Coelho tells using Polley’s first-person voice, reads like first drafts of tired, cynical diary entries. Characters are routinely introduced only by first names, and the lack of background information will confuse readers who weren’t in, for instance, a 1972 rehearsal or a 1988 performance. A conceit that divides whole chapters into split pages (one side play excerpts and the other Polley’s thoughts) is annoying, as is the insistence on inserting unexplained phrases such as “TIK! TIK!” While some of the biggest names in Canadian theater make appearances—Richard Monette, Martha Henry, William Hutt—they rarely come alive on the page as Polley says they did in her experiences with them. Ironically, the most involving sections tend to be the funerals of theatrical colleagues. This puzzling and disappointing biography doesn’t do its subject justice. (May)