Mark Blagrave has kindly provided introductory remarks for this virtual exhibition. Dr. Blagrave completed a B.A. from Mount Allison University and continued his studies at the University of Toronto, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. He has taught literature and theatre at the University of New Brunswick and at Mount Allison University, and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at Huron University College at Western University. He is also a playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories.
One of the greatest gifts that theatre has to bestow is the opportunity to rehearse—in the safety of the hypothetical universe of a play—situations, relationships, and decisions of the kind we may be called on to make in a much higher-stakes way in our lived lives. Theatre is also a fundamentally collaborative art, providing a crash course in cooperation and in putting the group’s needs before the individual’s, in order to deliver a good product. Discipline, analysis, and pattern perception are fundamental at all levels— from preparing a role, to directing a scene, to creating a workable design. Access to theatre experiences is therefore one of the most valuable preparations a liberal arts education can confer on students in their formative university years. The critical thinking skills, the empathy, the cooperation, and the creativity-under-constraint that are developed in making a piece of theatre are transferable to virtually any chosen path in life. I was doubly blessed in my experiences at Mount Allison—first as a student in the 1970s and then as a teacher from 1989 to 2009—to be part of a long tradition of university theatre firmly in the liberal arts tradition.
When I arrived for my first year in 1973 as a third-generation Allisonian, I was already familiar with some of the lore of Mount A’s theatre tradition. Professor Wilgar’s Romeo and Juliet in the 1940s had been a high point of my uncle Arthur Motyer’s undergraduate career; and my mother Jacqueline (Arthur’s older sister) had talked fondly of watching Professor Hamer’s Gilbert and Sullivan productions. There was an abundance of oral history around the senior class plays and annual interclass drama competitions, as well as the more recently formed Player’s Society. In 1973, the newly set up Windsor Theatre (carved out of the former Memorial Library stacks) was a revelation to me. The space had already seen productions of contemporary plays by students, and of Molière by Professor Alex Fancy. Tiny, underequipped, staffed on an occasional basis, the Windsor Theatre was nevertheless a space where real magic could and did happen. Not that everything always went according to plan. Arthur (who was by then Dean of Arts and maybe even Vice-President Academic) auditioned a number of us for a production of Romeo and Juliet but then had to cancel. I think a two-hander by Sam Shepard presented at lunchtime was the much more manageable substitute that year. The productions that followed during my undergraduate years gained in stability by being tied to an academic course called Drama in the Theatre and eventually by introducing a professional staff position in the Windsor Theatre. Students worked on all aspects of interpretation and production for academic credit, including productions of Everyman in the chapel (arguably Mount Allison’s most interesting building), and a Polish play (in translation) called Tango and McLeish’s J.B. in the Windsor Theatre. These productions not only allowed us to experience and experiment in the multiple disciplines that are harnessed for any theatre production, but also to bring to bear our studies in the various academic disciplines in which we were studying. When I look now at the cast photo for The Lion in Winter, produced on the Convocation Hall stage in 1976, I see people who went on to do things in the theatre and in music, but also in education, law, advertising, and equine dressage.
I returned to Mount Allison to teach in 1989. One of the attractions was a plan for a new state-of-the-art theatre, but the real professional draw was the opportunity to work in a university setting that included programs in fine arts and music. And of course, personally, I had so many happy memories of student days. In the twelve years that I had been away, many things had stayed the same. (Terry Craig and I were, I think, the first new permanent hires in the English Department since my student days.) The Windsor Theatre had had a few dozen more coats of black paint on the floor and some upgrades to its lighting, but was essentially the same old loveable (if sometimes frustrating) black box. The Area of Concentration in Drama, which had been introduced just before I graduated, was blossoming and would soon become a Major and a Minor as the academic program structure changed across the campus. Devised as an undergraduate version of the program at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, the drama program exposed students to theatre history and historiography, dramatic theory, dramatic literature (in a variety of languages) and practical stagecraft including acting, directing, design, stage management, carpentry, lighting, and costume. Mount Allison’s intimate size meant working with the same students over a range of courses each year. While that was no doubt limiting in some ways from a student perspective, it afforded unique opportunities for sometimes-surprising connections among ideas that (usually) outweighed the limitations. The Windsor Theatre continued to welcome students from all academic programs to work side by side with the drama program students, injecting some novelty and different perspectives for the small group of program students and providing the students from other programs with insight into the rigours of drama studies. In addition, colleagues in the Modern Languages Department and in Classics provided students with opportunities to interpret the theatre of the French, Spanish, and Ancient Greek traditions. As a rule, the plays produced sought to challenge audiences, living up to the mission of a liberal arts institution and taking advantage of the unique opportunities for experiment offered by university theatres. I used to encourage my students to revel in the luxury of being able to produce important and challenging work that might have a much harder time seeing the light of day in a commercial theatre.
Things do not always move swiftly in universities, but they do have a way of getting done eventually. Two examples may illustrate. When Arthur Motyer prepared to retire, a few years into my time teaching at Mount A, he finally managed to mount that production of Romeo and Juliet. In a glorious swansong that was a nod back to Wilgar and a fulfillment of a promise made in 1973, a stellar cast of young people was joined by members of faculty and the community. By the time I left my post at Mount Allison after twenty years, there were fresh plans to build a theatre to replace The Windsor Theatre. This time, they worked out, and the beautiful Motyer-Fancy Theatre was created in the new Purdy Crawford Centre—significantly, very nearly on the site of the magical old black box.
--Mark Blagrave, December 2020