Posted August 8, 2025

Behind the Scenes – Blyth Festival

Gil, could you give us a quick overview of the Blyth Festival for readers who may not know much about the history of the theatre and the kind of work you do there?

Absolutely. The theatre was founded in 1975, but incredibly enough, the building itself was built as a living cenotaph. In 1919, at the end of the First World War, the local Women’s Institute raised $26,000, and they built the Blyth Memorial Community Hall. When other communities were building marble monuments and bronze statues, (which is in no way to deride those markers,) the people in the village of Blyth and the surrounding area decided that they wanted a place to celebrate the culture that they felt their husbands and sons and fathers had sacrificed themselves for in the Great War. So they built this beautiful theatre, and for decades they filled it with concerts, and operas, and small plays, and lectures, and dances, and all kinds of things. There used to be two railroads that ran through the village of Blyth, six trains a day through town, which included touring vaudeville shows and other entertainments. But after all the trains were shut down, the town had a lot of trouble keeping the theatre going, and eventually the building was condemned.

And then, about ten years after the building had been condemned, Paul Thompson, one of the founders of Theatre Passe Muraille, and a bunch of artists who he was working with at the time, had been touring a play called The Farm Show all through the surrounding region. And they saw this space and they thought, “We want to use it. We want to put a show in here.” They were in the midst of creating 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt with Rick Salutin, and they needed a rehearsal space. And so they went to the township and said, “Hey, can we use this building?” And the township said, “Well, it’s condemned.” And Paul Thompson (being Paul Thompson, of course) refused to accept this answer, and instead he pushed and pushed. Finally, they were all told that if they signed waivers saying that they wouldn’t sue the town if the roof fell in on their heads, that they could use it. So they did, and they got to rehearse in this hall, and they fell in love with it. And there were a few other local folks curious about what they were doing there: a man named Keith Roulston who would go on to be one of the people spearheading the founding of the festival, along with James Roy and Anne Chislett. (They all had a connection to the community; James had just grown up down the road.) They decided to gather a group of volunteers and restore the building. So they raised a bunch of money, they restored the building, and they put on the very first season of the Blyth Festival in 1975.

That season consisted of two shows. The sure bet was Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. They thought, “Well, it’s the most-produced English-language play in the world. Of course, obviously, we will put that on because it will be very popular, and it will bankroll the other crazy thing we want to do.” What they wanted was to do an experimental play, working with the kind of the template they’d seen in Passe Muraille collectives like The Farm Show, and they wanted to create a play using local short stories by a man named Harry J. Boyle, who had grown up not very far from Blyth. He’d worked for CBC Radio, and he’d been kind of a local impresario and had written short stories about growing up on a farm in in the Depression in that part of the world, kind of loving remembrances. So they created a collective play called Mostly in Clover, based on Boyle’s short stories. And famously, that first season of the festival went up and they could not give away tickets to The Mousetrap. Nobody was interested. And yet Mostly in Clover completely sold out; audiences just poured out for this thing, and they were blown away. So they brought it back the next year. And with that, they created a mandate. They realized that by some alchemy, some miracle, the people in Huron County, in our part of the world, were interested in stories about the region. They were interested in stories about Canada. They were not especially curious about this British murder mystery that meant nothing to them. They wanted to hear stories about their community. And so the mandate of the festival was born, and it’s basically been untouched since. The mandate is to enrich the lives of our audience by giving voice to the region and the country.

That has led to the festival doing nothing but Canadian plays ever since. A lot of shows are very much locally focused: we commission writers, we develop the plays, and we premiere them at the festival. We try to bring Canadian classics to the stage as well. At the end of this season, we will have premiered 158 Canadian plays, which is astounding! I mean, I should also mention, for anyone who doesn’t know, that the population of the village of Blyth is one thousand people—that’s what the sign says anyway. It’s a very, very small town. And yet, in the midst of it is this four-hundred-seat theatre where we are able to put on premieres of plays. We have a loyal audience who are so excited about new Canadian plays that this is the thing they come back for, year after year after year. We run a rep season, and we just had something called the Bonanza Weekend. We do a special weekend in the middle of the summer where audiences can come on a Friday night, and if they stay until Sunday, they can see four different plays over the course of the weekend. It’s really an amazing thing. There’s a loyal group of longtime fans who come every year just for Bonanza Weekend. I talked to a couple this summer who has been coming for forty-five years! They’ve never missed a Bonanza Weekend, which is just amazing to me.

Must be a busy weekend for everyone!

It’s a full-contact sport. It’s quite a thing. I should mention that in 2021, we built a brand new bespoke outdoor space called the Harvest Stage in our local fairgrounds. We built it when nobody was allowed to put on plays, and we weren’t allowed to have audiences gather. We thought the thing to do would be to take advantage of the environments we have. We’re in this beautiful part of the rolling hills of Ontario farm country. And we built a purpose-built, open-air outdoor stage with 416 seats. We’ve continued to program shows there because audiences have really fallen in love with it. It’s an amazing spot surrounded by poplar trees, and you get to watch the sunset over stage left, and on your way back to your car. At the end of the night, you get to walk under the open canopy of stars.

It would be impossible to run the Blyth Festival without significant community involvement. Blyth residents go above and beyond—I’m thinking of initiatives like the Country Suppers at the Legion, for example. Why do you think the people of the area have embraced the theatre so wholeheartedly? What makes that partnership work?

That’s such a great question. I do think so, too, and this summer is a great example. We have a fleet of one hundred and sixty volunteers right now, which is amazing! These are the people who are tearing tickets on your way in the door; they’re getting you to your seat. They’re selling 50/50 tickets and concessions. They’re also serving on our board of directors. We’ve got all these amazing volunteers who are deeply invested in the place; some of them have been doing it for decades. We couldn’t do it without them. They are the salt of the earth, and very much the foundation we stand on. I do think often about that feeling of community and the depth of it.

This summer, our own Royal Canadian Legion Branch 420, along with the awesome force that is the Legion Ladies Auxiliary, are doing nineteen country suppers over the course of the summer, which is incredible. It’s something that audiences love because they not only see the show, they also go and sit and pass the potatoes! I have audience members who love that so much, to be able to sit with strangers and talk about the plays, talk about being there and what it what it means to them. It’s really important.

I do think so much of it has to do with not only seeing their lives reflected on stage but also seeing their local histories and local stories respected on stage. We treat these stories as equally valuable to the lineage of the Henrys, of the Tudors. I think there’s something special about saying: our stories really matter. Whenever we put local stories on stage, local characters on stage (as well as sometimes as actual local people onstage,) there’s so much celebration of it. It’s a kind of vital transmission that is going on in that space, and it’s much larger than any of us. It’s profound.

An example: Last summer we did a play called Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes [by Alison Lawrence, based on the book by Bonnie Sittler and Shirleyan English]. It was about the initiative at the end of the Second World War where young women, teenagers really, were offered the opportunity to miss their school exams if they would go and work on farms across the country, mostly in Ontario. With the men away, the farms needed the labour. And so all of these teenage girls pitched in and planted and harvested food crops, and they were an essential part of Canada’s war effort. They were heroes. The play told their stories, which were based on interviews that had been done with Farmerettes. Every night at the show, if we knew that living Farmerettes were going to be there, we’d make a point of introducing them to the whole crowd. There was one night where one of my favourite Farmerettes, a woman named Jean Brett who’s been coming and seeing shows at Blyth for years, had come to the theatre to see the show, and she had just turned one hundred years old. So there was a one-hundred-year-old woman in the house to see this play, and there was a cast of young women, mostly in their 20s and early 30s, who were performing the story and commemorating the effort that Jean Brett had been a part of. And then there’s another layer, which is that night at the theatre, there was a group of high school students who had come from Stratford Central, so there were all these teenage girls who were part of their school drama club who had come to see the show. So in the room there was a one-hundred-year-old woman who had lived the experience and these young women who were performing her story, putting a spotlight on it and sharing it. And then there were a group of teenage girls in the house who were receiving that transmission. And to me, it was the very thing that the richest filaments of culture burn with.

How is summer theatre different than theatre in the “regular season,” and why is summer theatre important?

I mean, for us who live in something affectionately referred to as “the snow belt,” running a season in the winter is basically impossible. We did have some local highways this year that were shut down for quite a while with tremendous snow. At my daughters’ school, students had forty-three snow days this winter! But about summer theatre: I think there’s something special about people choosing, as part of their restorative vacation time, to come and engage with these stories. I think that we get audiences who find that part of that restoration for them is taking the time to spend in community in that way. About a third of our audience comes from within a forty-five-minute drive from Blyth. Two-thirds of our audience are driving an hour or more; we get a lot of folks who are coming from London and Kitchener, and we still get a few people from Toronto. Last year we had attendees from four hundred and twenty-three different towns and villages all over Ontario, which is amazing. Amazing! So I think that the summer affords them the opportunity to travel and see what we have to offer. It is such a beautiful part of the world, too… That’s the other thing about coming to see theatre in the summer in Huron County—the farm fields, the Huron County sunset! Such a gorgeous, gorgeous place.

You’ve been the AD at Blyth for more than a decade now. I know this is an unfair question, but could you tell us about a couple of your favourite shows?

Oh, there are so many! One that springs to mind is The Pigeon King, which was a collective creation that we made at the theatre. At the end of the day, there were eight of us who co-wrote it, co-created it, a lot of it through improv, some of it through songwriting, some of it verbatim, too. It was based on a true story. There was a man, who, in about 2001, knocked on a neighbor’s door. He was a decorated pigeon fancier; he’d won awards for pigeons that he’d raised. And he knocked on the door and said, “Hey, listen, I have been hired by a Saudi prince to breed his racing pigeons, and I don’t have enough capacity in my barn to do it. I was hoping maybe you could help me out here. I will sell you these breeding pairs for ten bucks each, and then you sell me the babies. They can have eighteen babies a year, so we’ll make a deal, and you’ll come out ahead and so will I. You’ll be helping me out big time.” It was more complicated than that, but the neighbor bought in, and over the course of the next ten years this man, Arlan Galbraith, built a $40 million Ponzi scheme, and he roped in hundreds and hundreds of farmers into this thing. Arlan was folksy in his approach to everything, but at the same time, there was something fairly sophisticated going on. It got bigger and bigger and bigger, and it went international. He got breeders in the States. Hutterite communities in Alberta bought in. He preyed on the Amish and the Old Order (I think because they were not connected to the internet.) There were a lot of farmers in our community outside of Blyth who bought in. As he was building up this empire, he would bring on people as salesmen who would go out and recruit and it got more and more complicated. And at a certain point, the Saudi prince thing completely disappeared out of the narrative, and it became that he was breeding meat pigeons, along with other stories, all of which turned out to be completely untrue. At the end of the day, he was he was indeed arrested, and he was convicted. And he spent, I think, eight years in prison and is out on parole now. The other amazing thing is he defended himself in court. He fired his lawyer and defended himself in court.

When we were doing these interviews and starting to gather information, it took a while for people to open up, but eventually we heard so many stories! There was a man that we interviewed who was one of Arlan’s top salesmen. He sold over a hundred contracts and—incredibly enough—he sold one to his own son about three months before the whole thing collapsed and his son bought in at $140,000. And then he lost it all. This man had never figured out that it was a scam. We called him “Dave Zehr” in the show. And Dave, not only did he give us some amazing interviews, but he brought his son to opening night; father and son came to see the show, and afterwards they were effusive. They were downstairs in the lower hall, and they couldn’t stop raving about the show. I think this is an incredible feat, the honour of this man. After he saw the show, he went out to the Old Order communities where he had sold contracts, and he offered people the chance to come and see the show; he would buy them tickets. He bought blocks of tickets night after night, and he would pick them all up in this van. We’d come out on stage and there would be two rows of nothing but beards and bonnets, and we’d know that Dave must be back again.

It was so popular that we brought it back the next year and sold out a second run of it. And then Jillian Keiley, who at the time was the Artistic Director of the National Arts Center, came and saw the show, and she was so taken with it that she invited us to bring the production to the National Arts Centre. So we got to load up Arlan and his overalls and his rubber boots and the barn interior of the show and we got to do the play in Ottawa on the National Arts Centre stage, which was a beautiful moment for the Festival.

I find that so interesting because it’s a very different thing from when you’re telling the happy stories of the community. Here you’re digging into something painful, something that harmed people. You know some people are not going to like that, and some people are going to be upset. And yet it sounds like it turned out to be a cathartic, positive experience.

That’s happened in Blyth many times. I’m thinking now of something like Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott [by Beverley Cooper.] That ended up being one of the bestselling shows in Blyth history, and this is not light summer fare. This is a story of a of a teenage boy wrongfully convicted of the murder and brutalization of a young girl. It was a horrible case that rocked this whole country. All of that happened just south of the village of Blyth and staging that play and really reexamining what happened, and engaging the community in a conversation about what went on in our own backyard ended up being something that people were so ready to bear witness to. Those kinds of experiences—like Pigeon King and like Innocence Lost, and many others in that little canon of ours—as an artistic director, I find that so inspiring because it’s a constant reminder that our audience is brave, our audience is audacious, our audience is sophisticated. And our audience really wants to learn about themselves. They’re interested in that. They’re not just along for (for lack of a better term,) they’re not just there for pap, for pabulum. They know where they can get cotton candy. And that’s not what they come for when they come to us. They want they want the full-meal deal. And to me, as an artistic director, it’s an unbelievable blessing to have an audience that is that adventurous.

To learn more about the festival behind the scenes, be sure to check out the Blyth Festival Podcast!