Blyth Festival 2024: Shawn Kerwin's history with Blyth has nearly lasted a lifetime
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
For the Blyth Festival’s 50th anniversary, Shawn Kerwin will be designing the set for Beverley Cooper’s The Trials of Maggie Pollock - the true story of a Huron County woman who, in 1919, was the last person in Canada to be put on trial for witchcraft. Setting the scene for this dark chapter of local history isn’t going to be Kerwin’s first time in town - she has been designing sets and costumes for productions in Blyth since the 1970s, which makes her a great resource to tap for information on the Festival, then and now. The Citizen arranged to meet her at Balzac’s Coffee in Stratford to hear her first-hand account of what things were like in those early days, and how she approaches theatre design these days.
Kerwin came in from a costume fitting just down the street, recollections at the ready. Her lifelong connection to Blyth started in 1977, at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. Kerwin was working on a show alongside Blyth Festival founder James Roy. One day, he offered her a job for the summer, and she decided to take him up on it.
In the years since that job offer, Kerwin’s career as a designer has brought her to theatres all over North America and Europe. But she’s never forgotten the moment she arrived in Blyth in the summer of 1977. Much is often made these days of the fact that the Blyth Festival is located in a rural community, but when Kerwin arrived, it wasn’t just rural, it was really rural. “I looked north, I looked south, and I thought, ‘what have I signed on for?’ I’d been living in London, England, which is the centre of the universe. But I had such a great summer! By the end of the summer, I was sad to leave.”
The Festival had not yet acquired the garage that would become the workspace for its designers and builders, so Kerwin had to improvise. “You were doing a lot of your work in a driveway, or at the arena, or in a field….” To make a long-distance phone call, Kerwin had to speak to an actual telephone operator, who would connect her directly to the person she wanted to call. “It was much more remote, in a way, than it is now. And I didn’t drive, and I was living with James and Anne in a beautiful stone farmhouse on the Maitland River that was 20 kilometres out of town. If I didn’t get a ride home with them at the end of their workday, I had to sleep on the cutting table in the wardrobe.”
Since that first summer, different artistic directors have asked Kerwin to come back to Blyth and, when she could, she’s said yes. She likes spending her summers in the little town, and she believes in the Festival’s ideals. “It’s really important to me that the theatre has the mandate it does. I don’t really need to do a production of a Neil Simon play for summer stock. I’d much rather be putting effort into a company that has a commitment and a vision that I think is important.”
Kerwin became interested in the world of design through her high school’s theatre arts program. While she had no interest in being in the spotlight, there was something else that captured her imagination. “I didn’t want to act... but I loved reading things like the Greek plays, and trying to think about what those worlds were like - what their clothes looked like, what objects did they use?” Kerwin still asks herself those same questions when she begins a new project, but now, it’s up to her to work out what those clothes look like, and what those objects need to be.
For The Trials of Maggie Pollock, Kerwin still has a lot of questions to ask before she can create a world for the persecuted Pollock to inhabit. She’ll be the first person to try to bring Cooper’s story from page to stage, which means she’s got to put all the pieces together herself. “New scripts are always an interesting challenge,” she explained. “You can have an idea, and it’s either going to work really well, or be a really dumb idea.”
If she does her job right, when the characters in Maggie Pollock start coming to life, they’ll look around Kerwin’s set and recognize the space as their own. “I provide inanimate objects. I try to create spaces that can become animated... their clothing appearing effortlessly to be an extension of their character’s performance, and you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.”