Lisa Hood works with Young Company as its produces its take on the COVID era
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Last week, The Citizen sat down with the Blyth Festival’s new Director of Youth Engagement, Lisa Hood, for a wide-ranging conversation about what the Festival’s 2025 Young Company has been up to this season.
After a few seasons spent rebuilding after the pandemic, Hood is happy to report that the Young Company is back in full force. This year’s ensemble includes 16 young artists who have taken an especially-bold theatrical leap by creating their own original production rooted in personal stories pulled from the COVID-19 era. “Devising their own show was something I was really, really keen to expose young folks to… even if they never do theatre again, they’ve got that memory in their back pocket. That, ‘Oh yeah, I wrote a play. I acted in it. I performed the monologue that I wrote,” Hood explained. “These folks who came in the door thought they didn’t know how to write, and we have so much material now. It’s amazing. They just kind of uncorked the bottle and went wild.”
Among the company, the show is affectionately described as a “COVID extravaganza” that hopes to capture a surreal chapter in the lives of the youth of today. “It was this bizarre dreamlike scenario, and we are recreating that bizarre dream here on stage. So it’s a bit kooky, a bit crazy, but there’s been a lot of fantastic writing happening… when we started talking about our experiences in COVID, all of a sudden these great monologues started appearing. They just want an opportunity to say their side of the story and to be heard.”
The production will be performed at the Phillips Studio Theatre on Aug. 21 and 22, with both evening and matinee performances. Tickets are being sold through the box office.
Hood knows firsthand what kind of impact rural theatre programs can have on the life of a young person. “I’m a ‘local yokel’, born and raised in Goderich,” she told The Citizen. “My first sort of introduction to theatre, outside of a school setting, was at Young Company here. I was here doing Funny Faced Ogre with Gil Garratt as my director. We just got together and made cool theatre together, and it was an experience I had never had before. We were exploring Kabuki theatre movement, and it was just mind-blowing. I didn't know that’s what theatre could be. I thought it was something totally different.”
But putting together a youth theatre project in a rural setting isn’t without its challenges. “Distance. Always distance,” the director said. “Some folks have to travel upwards of 20, 30 minutes to get here. I wish I had a magic wand just to get everybody here.” The responsibilities of life as a young person also conflict with the collective creative schedule. “They’ve got to work at their jobs, so we're competing against life. But the folks who are in here, they are making it happen, no matter what. I just hope that they get from it what I got from it. A big boost to my confidence - to know I can walk into a room and make friends with strangers, create with strangers. That sense of pride and accomplishment from writing our own script and performing our own work.”
When asked where Hood see the Young Company in 100 years, the answer was full of hope: “Still as strong as ever. And students are still - young people are still - writing about their own experiences and finding a way to communicate that through performance. We had upwards of 10 to 12 people signed up before school even finished… all of these folks want to be here, and they are hungry to dig in. They’re keen to play games. They’re keen to try anything. That to me - a person who wants to come and wants to try - there’s nothing better in the world.”