Blyth Festival 2025: Madeline Kennedy to be Blyth's new Gloria in Festival debut
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
Madeline Kennedy is an actor and lifelong student of the arts who has spent her life immersed in some of Ontario’s finest theatrescapes. She hails from Niagara-on-the-Lake, and had just moved from Toronto to Stratford when she was offered the chance to celebrate Canadian heritage as part of the Blyth Festival’s 2025 company.
The young actor has been enjoying her first time in the pastoral environment of Blyth. “It’s been very tranquil, actually - it’s been such a nice welcome… I’ve gone from a bustling metropolis to, like, hearing my own heartbeat. It’s been really comforting - everyone’s so happy to be here, and everybody’s so grateful to be here,” she said.
Kennedy has roles in the lion’s share of productions at the festival this year, the first of which is the character of Anya in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Sir John A: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion. While the play is a comedy, it also seeks to offer a perspective on history that most Canadians, including Kennedy, probably didn’t learn in school. “He was the first prime minister - that was basically it,” she recalled. “I remember when we would sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, the callback that everybody had to say was ‘Sir. John A. Macdonald’ instead of ‘George Washington’. He was kind of just a blip on my radar… certainly not the drunk Scotsman that you’ll see in this production. We also did not get very invigorating Indigenous history lessons when I was growing up.”
Taylor’s play is uniquely structured - while most of the cast has been working together for weeks, one member of the cast has, until now, been rehearsing on their own. “We’re going to do a stumble-through next week of Sir John A,” Kennedy explained. “At this moment, we’ve been sort of separated from one of our cast members, just because of the structure of the show. So I’m excited to see all of it being threaded together,” she said.
She will also be playing the role of Martha in Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land, which is set in an Amish community located outside of Kitchener. Kennedy is excited to contribute her energy to this 1981 Blyth Festival classic. “I think folks who live in rural areas are often painted with one brush, when they are as diverse and interesting as the folks living in bustling cities. I think representation matters, always,” she told The Citizen.
If that wasn’t enough, Kennedy is also taking on the titular role of Gloria in Keith Roulston’s Powers and Gloria. “I’m very excited to work with Peter Hinton Davis,” she confided. “He and I had a brief chat after Christmas about ideas and thoughts and dreams about Powers and Gloria. And he assuaged fears I didn’t even know I had! He just sort of seems to have a very calm confidence in theatre, and his craft. I feel a lot of trust working with him already.”
That’s a pretty full plate for any actor! This is also Kennedy’s first repertory contract, so she wanted to prepare for the heavy workload as much as possible before arriving in Blyth. “Luckily, because I’m a brown noser, I found all of the scripts before they were sent to me,” she explained with a laugh. “Since Powers and Gloria is a late opener, I really wanted to have Anya, which is my first opener, locked-in and in the can, so I spent most of March really getting familiar with the script. Then, when I start to layer on Gloria in preparation for rehearsal later, Anya will be like a reflex, rather than trying to stuff everything at once. So, strategic layering is my method so far, and so far, it’s been successful. But I’ll let you know at the end of August if it’s 100 per cent successful.”
This may be Kennedy’s first rep contract, but she’s more than a little familiar with the concept - throughout her childhood, both her parents found steady work at the Shaw Festival and in Stratford. “I was raised in a very contract-secure household. I’d have friends of my parents saying ‘you’re getting a warped view about this business!’” But Kennedy doesn’t see it that way - she feels that having working actors as parents really gave her the confidence required to pursue acting as a career. “I saw it was possible for a lot of my parents’ peers and my family itself. So it was sort of inevitable,” she explained. “It was always going to be my path. In high school, I had so many friends panicking about their future, and I always knew this was mine.”
Growing up in a gorgeous theatre town came with other childhood advantages. “We were right down the street from the gazebo, and you can see Toronto across the lake. It was very magical - there’s fireflies in July, horses and carriages in the winter, candlelight strolls, and theatre everywhere - it was such a beautiful and romantic place to grow up as well - you could really idolize the future in the arts there,” Kennedy reminisced. “The only downside was that it was quite isolated - you had to have a car to go anywhere. There’s no public transit, and I couldn’t find north - everything is a grid.”
While she didn’t receive much of an education when it came to Sir John A. Macdonald in high school, there was one Canadian historical figure with whom Kennedy fell in love during history class. Laura Secord was a fleet-footed woman who helped win the War of 1812 by walking 32 kilometres through enemy territory to warn the British of an impending attack. “Learning about Laura Secord’s trek has always stayed with me,” she explained. “I went to Laura Secord Secondary School, so her story was really pumped into the curriculum. And it was just a lady and her two feet, making a difference.”
After high school, Kennedy attended the University of Windsor, where she began adding more tools to her theatre toolbox. She especially enjoyed site-specific devising, in which the performance space is selected before the story is constructed. “Typically, the site that is chosen is outdoors, or, it’s a found space. A big part of my degree at Windsor was devising - making up your own art,” she said. One such experiment involved creating an original, outdoor theatre piece inspired by Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters. Kennedy and her classmates were instructed to walk 10 minutes in any direction, and get to work. “It could be in a stairwell of the drama building, it could be in the Detroit River. The place inspires the story. And it’s so much fun!”
She’s since graduated and is not currently enrolled in any sort of classes, but Kennedy doesn’t consider her education to be complete.“You’re always a student,” she explained. “If you approach every new gig as a student that’s still learning, you can become a really good student. And there’s always something to learn, I think, that will take you very far.” The most valuable lesson she’s learned? “Be nice. That’s number one.”