Abandoned by his wife (for spirituality and yoga, she says), a retired teacher surviving a hard winter on memory and jokes finds that life still has surprises in store for him. Including an attractive former student and an empty old church that he’s turned into a theatre. As Ingrid Ruthig of Canadian Notes & Queries wrote, ‘Smuggling Donkeys lacks nothing in largeness of thought or spirit’.
Warren Thouless, recently retired teacher, long-retired actor, aspiring thinker, stuffed up in a small basement room that fell into disorder: that’s how the narrator of Smuggling Donkeys sees himself. His wife has left him, gone off to someplace in India on a spiritual quest; now and then she sends a postcard. Impelled by some mixture of desolation and high spirits, Warren has let Tessa Niles, a talented and beautiful former student, talk him into buying a deconsecrated church to turn it into a theatre, and he struggles to survive a winter of solitude in the empty building, delivering a comic monologue to an audience of one.
Gradually his life takes a new course. With Tessa’s assistance he begins to revive his career as an actor. His life becomes its own kind of spiritual quest. Shakespeare and Chekhov and Thornton Wilder provide words for him to speak. The gods (in all their strange variety) hover. He ends his story on the brink of astonishing possibilities.