Blyth Festival at 50: Gil Garratt brings the Festival into the modern day
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The Blyth Festival’s current artistic director, Gil Garratt, was born and raised in Toronto, but he’s trying to make up for that fact by living on a working lavender farm near Bayfield while he runs things in Blyth. Garratt has been sitting in the big chair since the fall of 2014.
Before he was the artistic director, Garratt spent 10 years as the Festival’s associate artistic director. “Some advice I got from Janet Amos, when I became artistic director, was - ‘You gotta live here.’ And it’s absolutely true,” Garratt explained. “Being a resident here, and knowing people in the community - the volunteers, but also the people who have nothing to do with the theatre, too - getting to know your neighbours out here is a huge part of what makes the Festival vital. So 2004 is when I first started living here year-round, and I went back to the city around 2012, and I came back out here in ‘17.”
Garratt also spent a lot of his early years at the Festival working with the Young Company, which is Blyth’s youth education program. “The Young Company is important for so many reasons,” he said. “One - arts education for teenagers is just so pivotal. For myself, just as a general rule, that was a life-saving force. I don’t know where I would be or what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had theatre and visual art and dance and music in high school…. But out here, especially, being able to find ways for all the kids who have that curiosity about art to be able to come together; to be able to have a place, because they don’t necessarily always find other kids that have that curiosity, even in their own school, and so being able to have our own community here that welcomes them, and puts, you know, the time, the effort, the energy, and the resources into supporting them, and what they’re doing.”
He also pointed out that the Young Company doesn’t just benefit the teens who take part - it also contributes to the vitality of Canada’s overall theatre scene. “We love to look back at all of the amazing young people who have graduated from the program, and see who's here at this theatre, and who’s there at that theatre, and, of course, there’s a whole bunch of folks that were Young Company that are here at the Festival. I think the experience itself is so rich and full and vivid. In my time, I’ve really tried to emphasize getting the Young Company to create their own work, in their own voice, as much as possible. There are too few platforms like that, where you actually have to stand up and say your own words. It’s a place of empowerment, right? A place for kids that feel a bit isolated to be able to come together and flourish. That’s the Young Company at its best.”
Having a lot of previous experience with the Blyth Festival is what made Garratt confident that he was the man for the job when the board was looking for a new artistic director for the 2015 season. “The wonderful thing about coming at this chair, when I’d already been so involved with the Festival for 15 years, and had worked with the Young Company, and been on stage a lot, and directed multiple shows, and already written for the stage, been to board meetings, knew donors - I had a real advantage when I was given this opportunity. And it was something I didn’t just care about, I had a sense of responsibility for. I think that’s critical. I knew already that this was so much bigger than me. It belonged to so many more people than me, and having the responsibility to put a vision in place that could meet all of us - that was the core thing.”
But Garratt didn’t spring forth, fully formed, from the eternal font of the theatrical - when he first came to Blyth, he still had a lot to learn. “Paul Thompson cast me in a show that we were co-creating called Death of the Hired Man. We were improvising in the old General Electric factory at Bloor and Landsdowne [in Toronto]. Funnily enough, my father, when he was a teenager, worked in that factory, when it was still actually a General Electric factory.”
Thompson’s Death of the Hired Man was constructed partially by interviewing farmers - the same method that he, and the rest of Theatre Passe Muraille, had originally used to create The Farm Show, decades earlier. “We went on all these amazing interviews, interviewing farmers who remembered the threshing era, which is what that show was all about,” Garratt recalled. “And I got to help create this extraordinary piece of theatre that people really devoured. We turned the whole of Memorial Hall into a barn. We had a giant threshing machine as a prop, and sheaves and sheaves of wheat, and pitchforks a’plenty. And I was playing this farm kid who was finishing out the season with his family and then he was planning to take off on the western excursion. It was a really exciting and transformative experience.”
During that show’s run, Garratt’s feelings about the entire purpose of live theatre changed. “I, as an artist, had never experienced an audience like that before. I had done a lot of shows, and made a lot of art, but, I think I’d always assumed that my responsibility as an artist was to express myself. And the audience’s responsibility was to applaud that expression. When I got here, it blew my doors open. I suddenly realized that the work - the show itself - actually belonged to that audience. And I just had the privilege of being a part of it. It was so freeing, as an artist. It was my first sort of sense of the real service that art-making could be.” Now, so many years later, Garratt has found that running the whole show in the Village of Blyth really suits him. “I’m not planning on going anywhere... this is the place. I don’t want to be an artistic director. I want to be Blyth Festival’s artistic director. To me, there’s a distinction.”
Like all those who came before him, Garratt keeps a mental checklist of the essential elements that are needed to make a great Blyth Festival play. “A sense of humour is critical. There’s something that has been so wonderful this year, with Saving Graceland [which Garratt penned to open this season in Memorial Hall] - there’s obviously some very heavy material that’s in that show. It’s about some real shadows in this community, and how we live with them and deal with them. I’ve been working on that show for a number of years, to try and find a way to have a conversation about this, because it’s all over the place, and we need to [have that conversation]. But you can’t have a conversation like that without having people laughing. So there’s a lot of humour in the show. There has to be.”
Keeping things as true to the local experience as possible is also essential. “Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is cadence. Being able to hear the cadence of the community on that stage is really important. I think that it resonates in a different way with the audience. Especially now that 80 to 90 per cent of our culture comes out of one area code, in Silicon Valley. That’s how we all receive our culture today. You will never hear a Huron County dialect on Netflix. Amazon Prime is not going to turn your grandfather’s threshing experience into a bingeable series on its platform. To be able to have this space, where we do celebrate those stories and put those voices on stage, I think that’s essential. It only becomes more relevant as more and more people are having all of their culture driven by social media and artificial intelligence. And they are going down that route at an incredible rate. And I think to be able to keep something that is as true as this, that is unique now, something handmade, bespoke and live in front of your eyes - that is precious.”
Garratt believes that a great Blyth Festival play needs to be relevant to the people living in the community today. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately too, about the idea of class. Canadians are really afraid to talk about the idea of class,” he observed. “We really like to think that class is not an issue in Canada, but it really, really is. I think one of the things on this stage is making sure that the lives of the characters are accessible to the audience. That’s really, really important.”
It may not be a big part of every single production, but Garratt has noticed that many of their most successful outings have one thing in common. “Looking around at all the posters, I do also think that a great Blyth show almost invariably involves music. Music is a really wonderful part of it, right? It’s just so evocative, emotionally. It really is a core feature. And then being about the place - that’s the biggest, biggest thing. I get excited when I find out that artists that are here for the season are also writers. Or when I know writers that have recently moved to the region, which has happened a few times. It’s always exciting.”
Garratt wants his time in Blyth to be remembered as one of great creative growth. “We have definitely stepped up our new play development in a big way,” he pointed out. “It’s been really important to me to see a lot of commissions go out the door. I want to see writers get paid to create work. That’s critical. When I first started, there were not many plays in development, for whatever reason... it’s become really important to me to always have a whack of shows that are in development.”
The Festival may have grown a lot in recent years, but Garratt is mindful not to stray too far from the original plan put forth by James Roy all those years ago. “I think you just have to stay as committed as possible to that mission. The real privilege of our jobs is that the mission statement for the company is so clear - to enrich the lives of our audience by giving voice to the region and the country. It’s just so clear.”
He finds that the Village of Blyth has been a fairly endless source of inspiration for the creative team at the Festival for the quarter-century that he’s been working there. “One thing that has been so exciting to see over the last 25 years is that we keep excavating, and we keep learning more about this place. Nobody that I’m aware of has been saying ‘OK, that’s enough Blyth stories. Let’s start telling some Comox, B.C. stories. Let’s put a lot more Fort McMurray on stage.’ This audience, and these artists are, I think, just as curious about this place as we were, as I was, when I got here 25 years ago.
Another big creative expansion spearheaded by Garratt was the construction of an outdoor performance space - the stunning Harvest Stage, which came about as a response to the pandemic. “One of the most wonderful things about the Harvest Stage is what it represents for this community. There’s something undaunted about it. During a period when things were shuttering all over the world, we came together as a community, and built this outdoor space so we could keep this thing going, and keep having shows.”
After 50 years of constant evolution, the Blyth Festival has managed to stay true to itself and its rural roots - a true feat of stewardship on the part of all the artistic directors that have come and gone. There have been a lot of changes, but Artistic Director Gil Garratt likes to look at the other side of that coin. “I think the amazing thing is how little it’s changed. The work we were doing 25 years ago was adventurous and exciting, and connected to the community, and vibrant, and always pushed the limits of what the room was capable of doing - and I think that’s still the case... I keep getting asked ‘What’s the future plan for the Festival? What are the next 50 years going to be? How is it going to change?’ And I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on it, and what I really come back to is that the radical and innovative thing to do is actually to stay the course. In 1975, there was a radical and innovative idea that was hatched - to create a theatre that would enrich the lives of its audience by giving voice to this community... it’s an innovation that only becomes more relevant.”