Following is a description of the original inspiration for Dreamsinger. In 1972, I was 19-year-old student teacher working at an innovative school for high school drop-outs in Halifax, NS. One of the students I worked with occasionally was a 16-year-old Mi'kmaq by the name of John Toney. He was a quiet, slightly shy fellow who wouldn't stand out in a room full of people, but as you got to know him a bit, you could sense a certain depth. In July of that year, he decided that he was going to write a novel. He scribbled down a paragraph that was going to be the intro for his story in which he described a strange and mystical experience of "falling up" into a magical world:

The time for thinking is past and the time to act is at hand, so this is the beginning of an out of this country and out of this world story. The amazing story starts out something like so; The night is dark and gloomy, the air is wild with a feeling that no one can describe, the ground itself shakes with the feeling of some lurking danger, which the earth on which you are treading upon only knows the happenings and trials in which you are going to be involved in on this mystic eve. Here you are walking down this long winding and dark path with woods on both sides of you which seem to want to jump out of the ground and wrap their branches around you and enclose you in the midst of them and have you blow your mind, then things begin to happen, you trip over a stump, so you prepare your self for the landing, but the landing does not come, you have fallen into a very deep hole which seems to have no ending, you are floating around in this deep hole and things seem to be acting weird. The ground is coming close but look again and you see it is not the ground but it is the sky so you look up and you see the ground with the birds walking, fish - - - all kinds of fish flying in the sky, but before you can really get a good look at whats happening you land on a soft cloud, the cloud is stable enough to walk on so you set off to find a way out of this world.

A couple of days after writing these words, he was out with one of his buddies (I'm sure he was not the leader in this expedition) and they broke into a cigarette store after hours (so no store employees were present) to steal a carton of cigarettes. Just at this point, a rookie cop came upon the scene, over-reacted, shot him in the chest and killed him instantly.

Everyone at the school was shocked and saddened; but life goes on for the living. In 1986, in a moment of inspiration, over the course of five minutes, I wrote the song Spirit Eyes. At this time, memories of that event from the past flooded back. I felt inspired to create a mythical John Toney, to give this anonymous young man from the past a future that would inspire others. Over the next few years, I wrote some 60 songs, of which I kept a third (the remaining half dozen I have written more recently).

Wrestling the script into shape has been has been much more of a struggle. I started it not long after my songwriting frenzy – it was workshopped and dramaturged over a long period –, but the present structure did not reveal itself until I reworked the script while I was recording the songs in the summer of 2007. Finally, I feel that all of the disparate elements of Dreamsinger have been pulled into a cohesive whole – the music, the narrative, the characters, the psychological tensions, the evocation of the dream world, i.e. other-than-normal conciousness.

Meaningful theatre is not simply entertainment. Rather, it is something that is multi-layered, and ultimately transformative. My hope is that those listening to these songs will see, hear and feel them in the context of what Joseph Campbell referred to as “the hero’s call to adventure” – the on-going challenge faced by each of us over the course of our lives. None of us can avoid tragedy forever. But when it arrives, we can choose either to let it defeat us, or to rise above it.

Matt Maxwell
Playwright, Librettist, Composer