John Hirsch; Noted Stage Director

John Hirsch, the Hungarian-born stage director who lost his entire family in the Holocaust and later said that nightmare became the political passion that drove his work, died Tuesday at a hospital in Toronto.

He was 59 and a spokeswoman for the Canadian Stage Company said he died of complications of AIDS.

Hirsch, who was one of only three survivors of 800 Jews in the small Hungarian town of Siofok during World War II, emerged in 1947 from a painful odyssey that had taken him through the internment camps of Europe to Canada. His parents had been prominent in the theater in Hungary where he staged his first play in the back yard when he was 6, and he carried that heritage to his new home in Canada, where he was adopted by a family of Russian Jews.

There he worked, graduated from the University of Manitoba and began an involvement with the theater that resulted in his founding two of them in Winnipeg. His career culminated in his appointment in 1981 as artistic director of the Stratford Festival which had begun in 1953 with Alec Guinness as “Richard III” and which today draws more than 150,000 during its summer season. He had been associate director from 1967 to 1969.

Colorful Career

Before, during and after that 1981-86 affiliation, Hirsch was director of more than 200 productions at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, New York’s Lincoln Center Repertory Company (where he won an Outer Critics’ Circle Award in 1968 for “St. Joan”) and founding artistic director of the Manitoba (Canada) Theatre Center. He also was the entrepreneur who brought productions to The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Mark Taper Forum (L.A. Drama Critics’ Circle Award for “The Dybbuk” in 1975), New York City Opera Company and many more.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, the scene of many of Hirsch’s triumphs, said after learning of his death that “John Hirsch lit candles in the theater, he illuminated the stage with passion; he believed the theater could communicate values and he exemplified that in his work.”

On Broadway Hirsch directed “We Bombed in New Haven,” which starred Jason Robards. Off-Broadway he received an Obie Award in 1970 as best director for “AC-DC.”

He also staged a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in Hebrew for the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv.

Comparison to North

Additionally, he was a writer, translator and lecturer at such universities as Yale, New York, Columbia and Southern Methodist and head of television drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Co. from 1974 to 1977.

Most recently he directed “Coriolanus” at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego into which he wove Oliver North and Irangate. He likened Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to North in that both were military patriots prepared to fight for whatever they felt right for their country.

Hirsch, who was awarded the Order of Canada in 1967, was noted throughout his career for contemporary choices of atmosphere in his productions.

“The classics are like litmus tests,” he said in an interview last year shortly before his health failed.

“You dip them into the fluid of the time to see what happens. . . .”

Hirsch is survived by his adoptive mother, a cousin and his longtime companion, Brian Trottier. Services will be held today in Toronto.