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The Citizen, 1994-07-27, Page 14PAGE 14. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 27,1994. Festival founder remembers 1975 ■HUB BLYTH In 1975, a young director originally from the Blyth area, James Roy, founded the Blyth Festival. In 1988 he recalled those heady days when the Festival started, fueled with little more than dreams. By James Roy In the early spring of 1975, I was an aspiring young director caught in the dilemma of no work opportunities and no possibility of opportunities for work until I could demonstrate my abilities to some artistic directors. The circle seemed unbreakable, so I had spent my first winter after graduating from university at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, filling various design and technical positions, and directing a small budget SEED Show. It was at this point, with the possibilities of further employment at Theatre Passe Muraille dwindling, that Paul Thompson asked if I was familiar with the theatre in the Memorial Hall in Blyth. I was not, though I had attended my first three years of public school in the village, a point that I was later to trade on mercilessly in establishing the local credibility of the Blyth Summer Festival. My early memories did include a vivid one of the basement meeting room in the Hall - we were marched over from the public school one morning for our polio shots - but at that time the upstairs theatre was used infrequently. And besides, what does a six-year-old notice? Theatre Passe Muraille had recently rehearsed the remount of "1837: The Farmers Revolt" in the building while a debate was raging locally over its proposed demolition. Built as a memorial to World War I in the 1920s and for decades the focal point of much of the social activity in the community, by the early 1970s the Blyth Memorial Hall was in need of costly roof repairs to prevent its structure from seriously deteriorating. Many in the village were anxious to replace the building with a modem, efficient cement block structure that would cost little more than a new roof. Fortunately, there were some propitious individuals who felt that the existing hall was an asset that should be preserved. The cause was championed in the weekly paper by its editor and publisher, Keith Roulston, and he was joined by some important members of the community. The most aggressive of these were a group of senior citizens who remembered how important the Hall had been to village life - and who still needed the basement meeting room for their euchre parties since card playing was out of bounds in church basements. They lipped the balance in favour of preservation when they discovered that their group was eligible for a government grant that could be put towards the repairs. The opposition crumbled, and the Hall was fitted with a new roof. However, there remained a lol of grumbling that spending money, government or not, on the building would not mean that it would regain its former glory as a centre of town activity. After all, the second floor theatre had barely been used since the advent of television in the 1950s, and that was -hardly going to change just because the roof was new. That was the situation I drove into on Easier weekend of 1975 when 1 arrived in Blyth, full of enthusiasm, for a meeting with Keith Roulston. He was cordial, helpful, and somewhat disbelieving that anyone would want to start a professional summer theatre in a village of 800 situated among the farms of agricultural Ontario. That he did not laugh outright at the absurdity of my proposal was the first small step towards the birth of the theatre company. Perhaps he felt that he had already crawled a long way out on a limb fighting to save the building, and going a little further could not hurt. By the end of our meeting he promised his support, and we walked down to the theatre where he took my picture for next week's newspaper sitting in the dark mustiness of the auditorium. Enthusiasm is not experience, and I had no idea how to begin creating a new theatre company. I did know that something called the Ontario Arts Council gave grants to theatres, and every theatre I knew had a government grant, so off I went to see Norma Clarke, then Associate Theatre Officer at the OAC. She explained that we would in fact be eligible to apply for assistance if the new organization set up a Board of Directors and incorporated. Back I went to Blyth where Keith and 1 sat down to draw up a list of potential Directors. Without realizing its importance at the time, choosing a Board was the first, crucial step in determining the eventual artistic character of the Festival. Theatre Boards, as I knew of them, traditionally comprised influential, well-to-do individuals who could bring a theatre good fundraising connections, and respectability. Essentially they remained replicas of earlier times when rich and powerful patrons were necessary to protect and bankroll artists. Though it would have been possible to create a traditional Board by drawing widely from the region and the neighbouring cities of London and Stratford, Blyth itself had few residents that one would consider to fit the standard profile. More important, I felt instinctively even at that early time, that if a professional theatre were to survive and flourish in a tiny village, it would have to grow as naturally as possible from the community itself. So on a Friday evening in April, Keith and I drew up a list of 19 key, community- spirited individuals whom we thought might actively support our new venture. Besides the two of us, the list included two of the three ministers in Blyth, a teacher, the village clerk, a councillor, and several of the prominent businessmen in the community. Since no lawyers lived or practiced in the village, we chose a candidate from a nearby town. The next day Keith and I set out to contact personally all of the individuals on our list. Each time, I launched into an energetic selling campaign aimed at allaying fears that the new theatre company would be a "bunch of no-goods from Toronto doing dirty plays". (Everyone knew that "I Love You Baby Blue" had just been closed by the Toronto Morality Squad.) Amazingly every candidate said yes to serving on the new Board, and we were on our way. Next task: grant application. The essential part of a request for government subsidy is the budget. Com­ pleting it required some hard decisions on the nature of the theatre season I was to mount. I knew I wanted adequate rehearsal time; four weeks seemed appropriate even though most "summer" theatres then made do with one or two weeks and their audiences seemed to be willing to overlook the resulting lower production standards. It also seemed sensible to maximize weekend attendance and word of mouth publicity by performing in nightly rather than weekly lum around, although the latter was the norm with summer theatres other than the Stratford and Shaw Festivals. The big question remained: how many and what plays to programme for the crucial first season. Two seemed the logical number to fully ulililze an acting company within the severe financial constraints of a beginning operation. In 1975 there were about five professional summer theatres in the province, again excluding Stratford and Shaw, most of whom concentrated on programmes of recent Broadway or West End hits, musicals and old chestnuts. Generally they had built large audience followings who seemed to appreciate the material presented to them. Only one summer theatre in Quebec, Festival Lcnnoxvillc, broke this artistic pattern with its policy of programming Canadian plays that had only been produced once previously. As interesting and successful as some of the work had been there, basing an artistic policy on a numerical total did not seem relevant to the Blyth situation. Prudently then (or so I thought), I decided on "The Mousetrap" as one half of the season. However, my few months around the burgeoning theatre scene in Toronto had stirred my incipient artistic sensibility to the point that I knew it would be more exciting to round out the season with material closer to home than a crisis in an English manor. By chance I came across a book of anecdotal reminiscences of growing up during the Depression in the Blyth area that I had read as a youngster. Five minutes of thumbing through Harry J. Boyle's "Mostly in Clover" and I was certain that I could find enough material in it and two accompanying volumes to form the basis of a collectively created play. In spite of the risk, or because of it, I decided it would be most exciting to actually open the season with this show. The program set, I finished off the application to the Arts Council with the assistance of my wife, Anne Chislett, who, family help being the cheapest, had joined Keith (by now Chairman of the Board of Directors) and myself as Administrator of our new venture. The entire first season was budgeted at $10,000, a large sum of money when no revenue was guaranteed. We realized that it would be pure madness to proceed without some Arts Council support, and even with it, wisdom indicated that it would be wise for several of us not to draw salaries until it was certain that the Festival would be financially successful. Because time was pressing, I could not wait for the decision of the Arts Council, and proceeded to choose the acting company and staff, warning them that we could proceed only if there were a favourable response to our grant application. There were eight of us in total, all young professionals between theatre training and an Actors' Equity card. We were only a few days from rehearsal start at the beginning of June when word finally came that we had been granted Continued on page 17 A rousing ovation to the Bly th Festival for 20 seasons of outstanding Canadian Theatre Blyth and Flersherton Blyth Festival we’re proud to honour you on your 20th Season. SHARP DEALS ON QUALITY - CLEAN READY-TO-GO USED CARS Great Savings on These Used Cars & Trucks. 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