Glassco, William (Bill)

William Glassco (Bill) (August 30,1935 - September 13, 2004)

Bill’s birth was recorded by his maternal grandmother, Lady Blanche Price, in the pencilled diary she wrote on her bedroom wall at Fletcher Cottage in Tadoussac. William was the youngest child of Willa (nee Price) and J. Grant and as he was born on the same day as his grandfather, Sir William Price, was named in his honour. Bill and his siblings, June, Dick and Gay were each born in Quebec City, raised in Toronto, and summered in Tadoussac. Together with a gaggle of cousins who would spend summer days in unlimited adventures, Bill formed a connection to Quebec and Tadoussac that ran throughout his life.
Educated at Upper Canada College, Ridley College, Princeton University and as a Rhodes Scholar, Oxford, Bill was settling in for a stable career as a tenured English professor at the University of Toronto. Maybe it was the memory of Tadoussac dress-up boxes and the elaborate plays and musicals he produced, casting any available cousins and performing for dour aunts and exasperated nannies. Or how he cajoled all the neighbourhood kids to perform in his basement on Dunloe Road in Toronto’s Forest Hill, for parents and friends. But Bill took a leap of faith and abandoned his tenure in 1969 to move his young family to New York City for two years so that he could become a theatre director. Upon returning to Canada in 1971 he and his wife, Jane (nee Jordon) started the Tarragon Theatre, committed to developing the works of Canadian Playwrights, both French and English. He nurtured and produced many of Canada’s foremost playwrights, David Freeman, David French, Judith Thompson, James Reaney, and, with John Van Burek, translated many of the plays of Michel Tremblay. Michel-Marc Bouchard was a life-long friend and he both translated and directed many of Michel-Marc’s plays. He also formed what is now CanStage in Toronto in 1988. In 1990 he moved to Quebec City to further his freelance career in French Canada and then to Montreal where he founded the Montreal Young Company in 1999.
When his marriage dissolved in 1976, Bill brought his three children to Tadoussac for the first time. They stayed in the hotel and Bill set his eye on his grandmother’s house, Fletcher Cottage, which was owned by two distant cousins who were tiring of maintaining such a huge property. By the next summer Billy owned the house and was a Tadoussac boy once more.
He used the large house facing the bay as the ultimate salon, inviting people all year to come and stay for a week in the summer. He would entertain family, theatre artists, and old university friends from across the globe. Dinners of 25 were not uncommon and luckily the house could stretch to fit most of them. There would be morning swims across the lake, outings to Bon-Desir, hikes up the fiord and jam-making sessions that would last days. He was a gifted pianist, a master of the American Musical Songbook, and evenings were full of music and singing.
The chapel will remember Bill for his consummate organ playing. He loved the formal traditions of Tadoussac and the unique social spiritual mix that happened on Sunday mornings at 10:30. At 6 foot 4 inches he was a total gentleman with a passion for theatre and Quebec and a terrific sense of fun.
Bill died of thyroid cancer at his daughter’s home after one last summer in Tadoussac in 2004.
Fletcher Cottage carries on Bill’s traditions through his children and grandchildren: Daniel and Karen and their son, Tyler; (Briony and Clive and their chidren, Max, Zoe and Kyra; Rufus and Dinora and their two boys, Sebastian and Benjamin.
In 1998, Bill started the Tadoussac Playwrights Residence, which his family have carried on to this day in Bill’s honour. Now called the Glassco Playwrights’ Residence in Tadoussac, 8 playwrights and translators are invited to work together at Fletcher Cottage for 12 days each September under the mentorship of award-winning translator, Linda Gaboriau. This nationally recognised program, run in collaboration with Playwrights Workshop Montreal has introduced many playwrights and translators to Tadoussac and to Quebec and allowed them to flourish and write in this special place producing plays that would make Bill proud.

Briony Glassco