Photo by Mark Frohna
Jonathan Gillard Daly, Jack Forbes Wilson. |
Every Tuesday Martin Daly would gather the week’s mail together — from Japan, from the South Seas, from Panama and across the world. Laid out carefully against the green felt of his basement pool table, he would piece together the news from each of four sons and a son-in-law serving during World War II from all across the globe. Snipping a paragraph here and a paragraph there, Martin Daly’s weekly basement ritual became a kind of newsletter for those he loved, documenting the struggle of an American family trying its hardest to stay close and connected while thousands of miles apart.
More than 60 years later, those letters have been transformed, then transformed again. First a key for Martin’s grandson, Jonathan Gillard Daly, to understand a defining era in his family’s lives years before his birth. It’s now a story that he’s willing to share with the world, transformed into a musical, “The Daly News,” on stage this season with the Great River Shakespeare Festival.
The newsletters piled up, thick manuscripts outlining communications among the Daly family between 1943 and 1947. In the early ‘70s, Jonathan Daly’s father took the stack of newsletters to a printer and had copies made for the next generation. Jonathan began reading the correspondence then, a book about the size of a big city phone book. But it was years before he picked up that slice of his family’s history with the fresh eyes of a grown man, when what he found helped him understand the father he’d just lost, and a grandfather he’d never met.
Jonathan says it was a rough time in his life when he picked up the book of newsletters again, a time when it seemed like his whole generation was not sticking together, when the relationships around him seemed sadly disposable. He started thinking about the strength of his own family, the ties that bound them through so much, and realized he had something to learn there. “These people stayed together for years and years, through all these difficult times,” he said. “Maybe they have something they could teach me about the nature of human relationships and what it really requires to keep them alive and well and thriving.”
Jonathan knew that there was a great play inside those worn pages. But what he began to realize was that there was more, there was a way for him to get to know his dad, to meet his grandfather for the first time. “As the play started to develop I thought this was a way for me to get involved, for me to reflect upon my family. I realized I was getting a chance to know the dad I literally never got to know,” he said. “It turned out to be this wonderful gift from generation to generation my grandfather gave me without realizing.”
Jonathan’s father, Robert, died in 1980. Jonathan was 25, just at the point in his adult life when children begin to embrace and understand their parents as real people. “He came from a generation that really didn’t talk a whole lot about themselves,” said Jonathan of his father. “One of the things I discovered is that I really didn’t know my dad that well.”
The characters, the personality, the spirit, strength and courage of both those fighting overseas and those keeping the home fires burning were recorded in those pages, and Jonathan said that the play helps show an era in America when everyone made enormous sacrifices to keep their dreams, and their families, intact. “There was a real desire on the part of the people who were at home to keep things as normal as possible, to keep that world going,” said Jonathan. “They were like the guardians of the future, and when all these people came home from this horrible conflict, by God, they were going to have a good life.”
Today, Jonathan is the same age that his grandfather Martin was when he died. Over the years as Jonathan pored over those pages, as he wrote and rewrote and perfected his play, he wondered about the man who had initiated a family project that would span generations and decades. The family folklore he'd heard about grandfather Martin Daly was that he was an affable, gentle and kind man, reflected in the pluck of those years and years of pages. And Jonathan says that he began to wonder where the weakness was in this man, where were the flaws? "Then I realized that's really part of that WWII era ethic," he said. "The petty things are not worth writing about, we've got a bigger eye on what's important. He was simply refusing to acknowledge that little disappointments in life are important. He just had a very strong will, and he really felt for his kids. He did a lot of child-rearing, a lot of counseling, in those letters."
When Jonathan first began performing "The Daly News, " the production featured many characters and actors. But the show has evolved into three actors, including Jonathan, who plays himself, his grandfather, and his grandmother. In fact, each of the three male performers takes on the role of grandma at some point in a play that reflects on an era, a family, and a bit of history.
Performing and sharing something that is truly a piece of himself is different from performing other roles, he admits, but it's all about storytelling in the end. It has the music and the humor and the heart, all of the components of a good show worth sharing, he said. "I think the toughest part of it was writing it, trying to dig down and figure out what it was that I wanted to share with people," said Jonathan. " It's been with me my whole life, a lifelong project that I just completed."
"The Daly News," starring Jonathan Gillard Daly, Jack Forbes Wilson and Jeff Schaetske, music by Gregg Coffin and Larry Delinger, debuts Saturday, July 3, at 3 p.m. For the full schedule of GRSF events, visit grsf.org, or pick up a printed brochure at the Winona Post and many other businesses in the area.
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