By Kelly Kleiman
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, September 10, 2006

The words "endless summer" and "Canada" don't usually appear in the same sentence. But while other summer theaters are folding up their tents, the Stratford Festival of Canada in south-central Ontario is still going strong. In August the company premiered half a dozen plays, almost an entire second season. They, and others that opened as long ago as April, will run through mid-November.

Though the weather after Labor Day is hardly the stuff of Beach Boys songs, Stratford is a perfect destination for an autumn getaway. The crowds ebb, leaving room at the toniest restaurants and choicest bed-and-breakfasts. Ticket prices drop, and fall colors have their way with the omnipresent maples.

Ontario is Anglophone Canada, but few places in the province -- or the continent, for that matter -- give English greater pride of place than Stratford, where Shakespeare is big business. For seven months each year, the town -- 90 miles west of Toronto on, yes, the Avon River -- is Lourdes for North American lovers of the Bard. The festival ensemble performs new works as well as classics, but the draw is clearly the man who either did or didn't write all those plays while Elizabeth was queen.

Stratford is that rarity, a charming destination for couples and families that's also a perfect place to go when traveling alone. Any local B&B -- and there are dozens -- forms an instant social circle, because you're all there for the same reason: to see plays and talk about them. Even on the occasion when every other room at the inn was occupied by several generations of a big family, I was swept into conversations about the virtues of a bare-stage "Hamlet," anti-Semitism in "The Merchant of Venice" (was it the production or the play?) and whether an "Othello" set during World War II was faithful to the original. Someone has always just seen the play you have tickets for that afternoon, and strongly worded opinions are easy to come by.

Likewise, you may find yourself conversing between dinner tables or at a bar with someone who introduces herself by saying, as one woman did to me, "You've been at every play with me this week -- what did you think of 'Don Juan'?" In Stratford, "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" is not a pickup line but the likely truth.

This could, and sometimes does, get to be a bit much. Those who attend the festival year after year insist on the superiority of their particular B&B (or of the 1978 production of "Titus Andronicus") with an energy disproportionate to the subject's importance. And, in Stratford as in Washington, people are apt to claim acquaintance with stars of the primary industry, or at least refer to them in a confidential manner: Don't be surprised if someone asks whether you thought "Brian" was really up to snuff as Malvolio.

A bookseller approved my selection of Moss Hart's show-biz autobiography "Act One" with the observation, "That's what [festival artistic director] Richard Monette always buys as a gift." But if you love going to the theater, these affectations are a small price to pay for the pleasure of being surrounded by others who don't regard your passion as a quaint remnant of the days before DVDs.

The festival now operates on four stages. Right on the swan-laden river is the Festival Theatre, whose projecting roof beams make it look like a solid version of the tent in which the company's first performances took place. Downtown, the proscenium-style stage Avon shares a building with the tiny Studio Theatre, where productions may spill into the aisles between its steeply raked seats. And an old warehouse halfway between the two contains the Tom Patterson, named for the man who in 1953 decided that a backwater with a Ford factory and a printing plant for Harlequin romances should also become a tourist destination.

The multiplicity of venues assures that there's more theater in any given week than a sane human being can possibly take in, so pace yourself. If you attend a matinee and an evening performance every day of your visit, by the end you'll be hard-pressed to remember whether you saw "As You Like It" or "Much Ado About Nothing."

Innumerable activities supplement the plays. During the summer, choose from scholarly lectures, "table talks" with the actors and creative staff, and courses (for children and adults) on everything from Shakespearean text to prop manufacture. By now the hectic pace has subsided, but there are still backstage tours, costume and prop shop tours, and even mock dress rehearsals for "Twelfth Night."

Take some time just to stroll around town, whose modest pleasures are the perfect counterpoint to intense theatergoing. There's nothing you have to see, so you can check out the exhibit of actor caricatures at the Gallery Stratford -- or not; go paddle-boating on the Avon -- or not; browse in used-book stores, Inuit art galleries and collectibles shops -- or not. The town square boasts a florid neo-Gothic Revival city hall, now converted to a visitors center, and the main drag of Ontario Street is anchored by another crenellated Victorian-century castle, which turns out to be the Perth County Courthouse. Near the courthouse, the city maintains a riverside Shakespearean garden ("There's rosemary, that's for remembrance . . ."), while in front of the Festival Theatre bloom lush floral beds designed and maintained by the festival staff.

It's a pretty place to take one's ease, unassuming midwestern Canada straight out of Alice Munro, that somehow manages not to be precious despite a riot of Bardic allusions (the natural foods store is called Gentle Rain, as in "The quality of mercy is not strain'd/It droppeth as the gentle rain . . . "). But plan to shop in the morning: Many stores close at 5 and all but a few by 6, meaning that once you've taken in a matinee, there's no time left to spend money.

Except in the restaurants, of which Stratford has a plenitude. A culinary school nearby produces a bumper crop of chefs to vie for the tourist trade.

So pack a sweater and go. For Autumn's lease hath all too short a date.

Kelly Kleiman last wrote for Travel about a Chicago cheese bar.