Blyth Festival at 50: Eric Coates oversees award-winning run for Festival
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
In the mid-1990s, a young actor named Eric Coates began performing at the Blyth Festival - a theatre company he so truly admired - but little did he know that, one day, he would be among the Festival’s longest-tenured artistic directors.
As part of the 1995 season, under Artistic Director Janet Amos, Coates was part of the casts of Anne Chislett’s The Tomorrow Box and Ted Johns’ Jake’s Place (and Johns’ He Won’t Come in From the Barn for good measure). He would return the next year as part of Paul Thompson’s Barndance Live! cast and continue to act on the Memorial Hall stage until an even greater opportunity within the Blyth Festival presented itself.
However, it all started many years earlier when Coates watched The Clinton Special, a short film directed by famed Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, which included footage from the production of and making of The Farm Show, a watershed moment in Canadian theatre. He identifies that event as being a really important and formative experience in his life as a burgeoning theatre professional.
He knew that was the kind of grassroots and important storytelling he wanted to do through the theatre, so when the opportunity to act at the Blyth Festival presented itself, he jumped at the chance.
As Anne Chislett, one of the Festival’s three founders, took over the position of artistic director in 1998, taking the reins from Janet Amos, who had pulled the Festival back from ruin in the seasons spanning from 1994 to 1997, she approached Coates about a potential mentorship placement. Coates was paid by way of a grant through the now-defunct Theatre Ontario and he began to learn about the inner workings of running a theatre company like the Blyth Festival from one of the masters. Chislett, who not only is credited as one of the founding members of the Festival, but is celebrated as a Governor General’s Award winning playwright.
He learned about the complexity of making decisions and programming seasons and how much “armchair quarterbacking” was done by those who had not lifted the curtain on the inner workings of the Festival and didn’t understand all that it took to run it. He developed a great appreciation for the work being done and the effort it took to do it.
And yet, when it was time for him to take the reins, Coates admits that he was brash and more concerned with his own personal successes and importance than he was with the success and importance of the Festival, calling his first season in 2003 an “unmitigated disaster” that was saved only by the runaway success of David S. Craig’s Having Hope at Home - a touching comedy that he would remount as part of the 2012 season.
Coates said he was tremendously humbled by that first season and that he learned a lot from its failures and successes. He said that getting over himself, to a certain degree, was an important step, and he looked to the advice and guidance of those who had come before him, citing the famous Mark Twain quotation, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around, but when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
One of the misfires he remembers vividly was attempting to mount David French’s famous trilogy of “Mercer Plays” beginning with Leaving Home in 2003, which was not received well at all, despite its reverence in the theatre world across the country.
Undaunted and committed, Coates stuck to his guns and produced Salt-Water Moon in 2004, which was a slight concession from his original plan, mounting the plays out of order to include the widely popular Salt-Water Moon ahead of Of the Fields, Lately, the linear second play in the trilogy. He abandoned his plan in 2005 and did not produce the third French show at the Festival.
He said that Salt-Water Moon found a modest audience in 2004, exceeding the success of Leaving Home, but, in what he said was a clear and shameless attempt to ingratiate himself with the local audiences after a so-so first season, he remounted The Outdoor Donnellys, a collective helmed by Paul Thompson and Janet Amos. The show had found so much success in 2001 and 2002 that he returned to the well and it paid off, as audiences flocked back to the theatre, eager to see one of the Festival’s landmark shows one more time.
As predicted, it was a success and Coates also struck gold with Anne Lederman’s Spirit of the Narrows, which he would remount in 2005 due to its success. Also that year, he produced Powers and Gloria by Festival co-founder and noted playwright Keith Roulston, in addition to the remount of Peter Colley’s I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, another of the Festival’s hits from years past.
Then, in 2006, Coates hit his stride with The Ballad of Stompin’ Tom by David Scott and Another Season’s Harvest by Roulston and Chislett, marking a return to the realities of farming in Canada in the early 2000s in a much-heralded sequel to Another Season’s Promise from 1986 and 1987.
Coates said he was never exactly “comfortable” in the position of artistic director, which is a good thing, but he did say that with that season he began to feel as though he understood the theatre and its audience a lot better than he did in his earlier seasons. Furthermore, he said he, slowly but surely, began to learn the important lesson that he would never please everyone.
The next season brought with it one of the pieces of which Coates is most proud: Reverend Jonah by Paul Ciufo, a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. The show represented the kind of progressive story Coates strived to tell, including the first same-sex kiss in on-stage Blyth Festival history.
And what made all the difference in being able to tell that story, Coates said, was having a local person tell it. Ciufo, who has flourished as a Huron County-based playwright both at the Festival and beyond, had an understanding of the community and its ways that was such an asset to the story being told in Reverend Jonah, Coates said, and it made it digestible for the Blyth Festival audience.
The next year he found another hit with Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott, written by Beverley Cooper, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award that year, giving Coates and the Festival back-to-back nominees.
Coates says, embarrassingly, that he rushed to produce the play before the Supreme Court ruled on Truscott’s years-long battle. He said it was important to tell the story from the Huron County perspective before that decision was made and to not “jump on the bandwagon” after it had been made, regardless of the outcome of the decision.
He recalls asking Cooper to take on the project, complete with his aggressive timeline for production. Coates says he played hardball with Cooper, wanting her to take it on - another aspect of the story he says he’s a bit embarrassed to tell - and eventually convincing her to write the play that would engage Festival audiences in the 2008 and 2009 seasons.
Soon after, Coates felt the need to move on and take on a new project. He had been part of the Festival for nearly 20 years, all told, and thought it was time for a new challenge. The Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa was looking for a new artistic director and he felt it was a perfect fit. He described the theatre as being almost like the Blyth Festival, but plunked in the City of Ottawa, rather than the Village of Blyth. It had a similar mandate to tell Canadian stories, but he knew that he could tell more politically progressive stories there without the controversy that might greet them if they were produced in Blyth. (The Great Canadian Theatre Company is also celebrating its 50th anniversary season this year.)
And yet, after 10 years in that position, Coates felt it was time to move on again, although the next chapter of his life was a drastic deviation from his theatre-dwelling younger years as he worked to connect with his Indigenous family roots on the west coast of Canada.
Coates is a member of the Samish Indian Nation, descendants of the Coast Salish People, located in Washington State. He said that, as a young man, he always knew a bit about his Indigenous roots, but didn’t have the resources to research them in-depth or consider making it a bigger part of his life. Now, he said his whole worldview has changed and just about everything he does is done through the lens of being a member of the Samish nation.
He began visiting with those community members and becoming part of the community himself. He first embarked on some language reclamation work and then has since become a big part of the nation’s annual Canoe Journey, which travels up and down the west coast of Canada and the United States. In fact, he is now the Skipper of a 35-foot traditional, dug-out canoe and has had the privilege of taking some of his closest family members on it with him.
He has not, however, retired from the world of theatre and will still work here and there on a freelance basis. However, the vast majority of his work since reconnecting with the Samish nation has been focused on Indigenous stories, issues and culture.
He was part of a piece that was produced in Kamloops on language reclamation and then, last year, he directed Bentboy at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre, earning him a Dora Mavor Moore Award. Earlier this year, he directed The Comeback at the Royal Manitoba Theatre in Winnipeg, which earned rave reviews in its run from late April to mid-May.
When asked to look back on his time at the helm of the Blyth Festival, Coates is introspective, saying he felt a great deal of shame, especially in regards to those early seasons, in which he felt like he missed the mark on the work the Festival did and continues to do within its community. He wishes he could have seen past his sense of self in order to see the greater mission of the theatre earlier than he did.
The work of the Blyth Festival, he said, runs so much deeper than the work of a theatre and a theatre company’s bottom line and is about a community and its people and ambitions, as opposed to his own. And yet, he’s proud of the work he did and all he accomplished, especially when it comes to young people and their continued success at the Blyth Festival.
Specifically, he thinks about the expansion of the Young Company program during his time in Blyth and the quality of the productions created by those groups. He cites talented artists like Curtis Campbell (then te Brinke), a successful theatre presence and published author, and Fiona Mongillo, the founder of the Here for Now Theatre in Stratford and a member of this season’s Blyth Festival company. Seeing those artists flourish, when they came to the Festival as just children all those years ago, has been a great source of pride for Coates.
The time Coates spent at the Blyth Festival served as the longest, most solid bridge to where it is today. Current Artistic Director Gil Garratt worked under Coates as an associate artistic director for many years, directing a number of shows. When Coates left, Peter Smith served as the interim artistic director for the 2013 season before a fabulous season from Marion de Vries in 2014 before Garratt began his time at the top in 2015.
That era is still unfolding and its umbilical cord can be traced back to Coates’ time in Blyth - even with its rocky start.