The Passage of Time - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Over the past few weeks, I have been speaking to a number of people involved in the upcoming Blyth Festival season. There have been wide-eyed young actors on the cusp of their professional careers, as well as some more veteran artists who can look back on a life well-lived with a great deal of perspective, winning Governor General’s Awards and being named a Member of the Order of Canada along the way.

 

Perhaps it was celebrating my birthday a few weeks ago or the passing of a young neighbour recently, but it was the older folks with years of perspective who stuck with me. Speaking with the great Keith Roulston, for example, he talked about Powers and Gloria, which will be produced at the Festival this summer. He wrote it as a 50-year-old man, telling the story of a man in his seventies who had suffered a stroke. Now a man in his seventies who has suffered a stroke himself, Keith said it was interesting to have that perspective and that he wouldn’t change anything about what he wrote. In fact, he was - forgive me, Keith, for putting words in your mouth - kind of impressed with himself in regards to how much he’d gotten right.

 

I just turned 43, which isn’t so far from 50. Then, in 20 years, if I’m lucky, I’ll be 70, looking back at things I’d written at 50. That was a bit of an eye-opener for me, just thinking about the passage of time and how quickly it can be. I often reflect on that with young children at home and how it still feels as though they were born just yesterday.

 

In addition to all of the art and pictures of my kids I have up in my office, I also keep another reminder of this very idea. Last year, when local artist Autumn Ducharme created the artwork for the Blyth Festival season, she sold lino prints for each of the shows in small-numbered collections. I have one from The Farm Show framed and sitting on my desk right behind a work area. This is less about reverence for The Farm Show, though I do have that for the show and for all that it means to theatre in this area and the creation of the Blyth Festival itself, but more about the passage of time and a reminder of it.

 

The image is of the famous tractor scene, in which the show’s creator Paul Thompson and others create a human tractor to be rode by Miles Potter. This indelible image from the show in the 1970s features young, strapping artists with their whole lives and careers in front of them. And, as any of you who read my review of the show last year know, there was a passing-of-the-torch feel to the production of that show in the Festival season last year. Original artists like Ted Johns and Janet Amos (who both sat directly in front of me for the production), as well as Thompson, Miles Potter, Fina MacDonell and others, were in the audience, now much older and watching the show, performed by younger artists who were then the age that they were when they first produced The Farm Show all those years ago.

 

I found it to be a profound reminder of the relentless nature of the passage of time and, as I navigate these interviews for the Blyth Festival special issue, I have had those same feelings speaking with the likes of Keith, Anne Chislett, Peter Hinton Davis and Michelle Fisk. In fact, as I’ve been interviewing a lot of professionals that I’ve never spoken with before, I have found myself telling them that I’ve been doing these stories for nearly 20 years with The Citizen. Perhaps that perspective is seeping into my process. 
The passage of time - none of us are immune. It’s important to remember, as those who see it through, we are the lucky ones.