Winnipeg's Sacred Monster
How a Hungarian war orphan became one of North America’s most brilliant — and mercurial — theatre directors May 2012
While the story of Canadian theatre is well served by a wide array of biographies and autobiographies, there has been one daunting topic hitherto left untouched: John Hirsch (1930–89). Born into an affluent family in Hungary, Hirsch came to Canada as a teenage war refugee; a decade later he famously co-founded Canada’s first civic professional theatre company—the Manitoba Theatre Centre—and went on to become one of North America’s foremost stage…