Blyth Festival at 50: Peter Smith guides the Festival into the early 1990s
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
In the barnyard of Blyth Festival artistic directors, there are some who would consider Peter Smith to be a bit of a dark horse, while there are others who might call him a black sheep. From 1991 to 1993, Smith used his time in the artistic director’s chair to take a lot of big risks, programming-wise. While not all of those risks paid off, ultimately, Smith feels grateful for the whole experience.
Originally hailing from Halifax, Smith was working at a theatre in Winnipeg when he first became involved with the Blyth Festival, at the behest of Katherine Kaszas. “We were having a good time, and then she said ‘you should come to Blyth’. And I said ‘OK - I don’t know where that is.’” After that first visit to Blyth, Smith headed back east and began developing the well-rounded résumé that eventually led him back to Blyth. “I started up with directing, and then artistic directing, dramaturgy and producing - learning about a bunch of different aspects of the forum, of the arena…. You never know when you’re going to walk into a learning experience. Often, the best learning experience is the one that humbles you, I’ve found.”
The siren song that drew Smith back to Blyth was the Festival’s dedication to producing new work. “I just couldn’t get enough of new work,” he admitted. “Really, a director is the first audience of a new play. That’s a position that I came to love and appreciate. Witnessing something coming to life for the first time, and then 25 pages get cut, and you’ve got a new ending and all those things, it’s like being in a creative cauldron... So that was probably the beginning. As I said, there were many humbling experiences along the way.”
Kaszas eventually asked Smith to be the Festival’s associate artistic director. “It meant you read the hundreds of plays that people have submitted. That was another real education - reading play after play after play.” Driven on by his curiosity, Smith kept putting one foot in front of the other, and soon found himself in the role of artistic director.
Something he learned early on was that the Blyth audience is always willing to engage in a bit of open communication. “Scrimgeour’s used to be the grocery store, and you’d go in there after an opening night, or even after a preview, and people would come up and stand beside you, and they sometimes wouldn’t say anything, and I’d think ‘this is awkward’, and I’d nod,” Smith explained. “And then they would say ‘Well, you kind of missed the mark there last night,’ and then they’d just walk away.”
Of course, it wasn’t all negative reviews that were shared in the grocery store aisles. “Other times, people would come up, and just stand there, and they’d go ‘that was pretty good.’ And I just came to appreciate that contact with the audience that you just don’t get in a lot of theatres. I’ve worked coast to coast to coast - Blyth is a very special place in that regard. It’s the connection to the community.”
One of Smith’s favourite productions from his time at Blyth wasn’t a huge hit with everyone in the audience, but it certainly had its fair share of fans. “In the first season that I was artistic director, I performed in The End of the World Romance by Sean Dixon.” Smith’s wife, actor Laurel Paetz, was also in the show. “It was a fascinating piece of poetry-prose. For some people, it was just such an electric experience in the theatre. It really was. But there were also people that were like ‘this isn’t a Blyth play, it’s too odd, it’s too peculiar.’ But looking back, I’m really glad that we did it - it’s a beautiful piece of writing.”
Another one of Smith’s most memorable contributions to the pantheon of Blyth Festival plays was 1993’s Many Hands. “There were like 200 people in it! There was a parade every night through the Village of Blyth - there was music, and stories. And it’s the story of a place, told by the people of the place. There were kids, and adults, and bankers, and people from the pharmacy, and farmers - it was nuts. It was a crazy large event that 400 people saw every night. They followed behind this parade, and there were scenes on lawns, and graveyards and in trees, and on rooftops, and then we ended up at the rutabaga plant.”
One of the shows that had the biggest impact on Smith during his time working at Blyth was Another Season’s Promise, written by Festival founders Keith Roulston and Anne Chislett. “It was a seminal moment for me. There was just a whole lot going on. There were the farm survivalists with the red arm bands, the penny auctions were happening - this was all in our lifetime. This wasn’t some distant, Okie from Muskokee kind of thing. This was going on. It was a powerful story that was about them, but it actually traveled. It could have been told anywhere.”
Smith counts himself lucky to have been in the room on the show's opening night. “You could hear a pin drop. Araby Lockhart and the late, great, David Fox played the heads of the family, and David’s character came to the realization that his farm was actually going under. Many generations, and all that let-down, and the weight on his shoulders... you couldn’t have had art being any closer to an audience than that. It was a moment when the art, the creativity, and the audience were one.”
Looking back at his time in Blyth, Smith has come to accept that all the ups and downs were all just part of the same big ride. “It was like one big season. It was a blur. And now, where I’m at is mostly letting go. And I think that would have been good to have in my pocket... Every season has its sparrows, and its vultures, and its turkeys. As a stage manager once said to me, ‘you put just as much energy into an eagle as you do a turkey’. It doesn’t matter, you just keep pouring it on.”
After his first run, Smith returned to the helm of the festival one more time as interim artistic director in 2013, following the departure of Eric Coates. Smith had his work cut out for him that season, but he didn’t let it get him down. “It was fun. It was really a lot of fun. The season was fun, and it was great to be back. And really, what came out of it was fixing the leaky roof and the new seats. And Project 1419 was born, which was another community event I did not plan for, and was not even interested in participating in, but it started in that interim year because we needed to replace the seats and fix the roof. That interim year was really transformative for me - I was back working with the company, bringing people together. It was an honour - it really was.”
Although he’s currently occupied working as the creative director for the Canadian Centre for Rural Creativity, Smith often feels the inexorable pull of the Blyth Festival and its steady stream of new plays designed to entertain a local audience. “It’s like the ebb and flow of the tides,” he explained. “All this new work - it’s another season’s promise. You put the seeds in, you hope for the best, you hope for more sunshine and rain, and financing, and then it goes up, then it’s all of a sudden over.”
Being the artistic director of the Festival was certainly a wild ride for Peter Smith and the audience in Blyth, but he's happy to have shared that experience with them. “There were some dogs, and there were some goofy experiences, and all the rest of it. But there were those moments when art, story, community came together. In Blyth, there’s always the possibility of that - it doesn’t always happen, but the possibility of that happening - that’s the thing that draws me back to it.”