BF26: After 15 years, Kate Lynch is back in the Blyth Festival's director's chair
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Kate Lynch, the renowned Canadian theatre actor, director and professor, is back at the Blyth Festival this year after a 15-year hiatus, reuniting her with what she says is one of her very favourite places in the world.
Lynch will be directing Leann Minogue’s Dry Streak. It will be her first time back in Blyth since she wrote Early August - a satirical look behind the scenes of a small-town theatre not unlike the Blyth Festival - as part of the 2011 season. In the time that she has been away from one of her favourite places in the world, she has spent much of her time teaching theatre at the University of Toronto, directing in Toronto and Prince Edward Island and keeping her improvisational skills sharp.
Lynch has already relished the relationship she has developed with Minogue as they have had virtual meetings and worked together to update the script and bring in a few minor changes to the nearly-40-year-old play. The two have hit it off and have discovered a tremendous working relationship in the lead-up to the premiere.
She said she wasn’t familiar with the play beforehand, but that she was instantly very impressed with what she read. She says that it’s funny and deals with serious issues in a way that’s home in a community like Blyth or the community the show called home in Saskatchewan so many years earlier.
As for the Blyth Festival itself, Lynch says it holds such a solid place in her heart because of just how special it is. The work produced at the Festival is so brave and so unique, she says, that it elevates it head and shoulders above others. There are many summer theatres across Canada, but there are few that do what the Festival does and at such a high level of creativity.
Lynch has, for years, been a titan of the Canadian entertainment scene, spending most of her life as one of the top theatre directors in the country. However, she began her career in film and television, working with some of the biggest names in the industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1979, Lynch was chosen by famed director Ivan Reitman to star in Meatballs opposite the great Bill Murray. Reitman has spoken at length about the casting of strong women opposite the Academy Award nominee, invoking the names of Lynch and Sigourney Weaver as such women.
Reitman has also lauded Lynch’s improvisatory skills, saying that is why she hired her for the film, which is seen as a precursor to Reitman’s work on some of the best comedies of the 1980s, including Stripes, Ghostbusters and Twins.
It should be mentioned that Lynch won the 1980 Genie Award for Best Actress (now the Canadian Screen Awards) for her work in the film. Lynch was awarded at the first-ever Best Actress Genie Award, with the first installment of the Genie Awards being handed out that year on March 20 in Toronto. The winner of the Best Actor Award that year was none other than Christopher Plummer.
Lynch would continue to work consistently, amassing eight film and 30 television credits from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s when she took a short break. She would return in the mid-2000s and continue well into the mid-2010s, all while working consistently in the Canadian theatre world as well.
She has spent much of her life and career as a voice and acting teacher at the University of Toronto, while also directing notable productions at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, as well as the Theatre Passe Muraille and the Blyth Festival, including The Nuttalls, Courting Johanna and others.