‘We couldn’t have done what we did anywhere else’: Northern Light co-founder Scott Swan looks back 50 years later

“We couldn’t have done what we did anywhere else!” declares Scott Swan.

He’s talking about Edmonton, and the persistently adventurous and surprising little theatre company he and three of his best friends, West Coasters all, co-founded here half a century ago. He’s thinking about how they kept hearing ‘Yes, what a good idea!’ when they could have heard ‘maybe later’ or ‘what? are you crazy?’.

Northern Light Theatre turns 50 this season. That’s a lot of opening nights. And there’s one coming up next week when the anniversary season finale Request Programme opens, a Trevor Schmidt production that stars a different artist from NLT’s 50-season past every at every performance.

The exuberant Swan, actor turned director (and also coach, teacher, mentor, and raconteur par excellence) was in town last month for the 50th birthday gala. And he delights in the sheer eccentric unlikeness of the origin story he tells over coffee. It’s a tale of creative spontaneity, bravado, coincidences — and expanding connections and profile across the country.

To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Northern Light Theatre co-founder Scott Swam 1975. Photo supplied.

It began with Swan in his 20s, back from Vancouver fresh from director training at Bristol Old Vic, with a letter of introduction to John Neville, the international theatre star who’d become the artistic director of the Citadel. “Come! There’s work here,” said Neville, an empowering personality like Swan’s own. “Rolley Hugal and I are doing Oedipus. Come tonight and see the show.” Says Swan, “I sat in the back row (of the old Citadel). And it was incredible!”

The next morning he called his actor friend Allan Lysell in Vancouver. “I told him there’s something going on here I hadn’t seen anywhere else,” says Swan. “Get your ass up here … and experience it!” And that’s exactly what Lysell did.

Northern Light Theatre co-founder Allan Lysell 1975. Photo supplied.

It was 1974, and shortly thereafter the Gann sisters Angela and Merrilyn, theatre artists both, said yes too to the rather open-ended proposition on offer from their partners: “we’re going to Edmonton, do you want to come?” Says Swan, “the four us packed up Merrilyn’s Austin and my dad’s ’69 Mercury station wagon with the fake wood panelling on the side. And we drove up.” That quartet of yeah-sayers, in the right place at the right time, would change the scene in Edmonton.

Northern Light started small in March 1975. Swan took a proposition to Terry Fenton, the director of the Edmonton Art Gallery. “Your grants are based on how many people come through the door…. So what would you think if we did some lunch-hour shows? And he said ‘Yes! What a good idea’.”

“That’s Edmonton to me. In a nutshell,” says Swan.

The little 15-minute show, in one of the small galleries (“we got there at 11:30 turned the lights away from the paintings”) was a stage “collage” Swan put together of renaissance madrigals, “witty sexy sonnets, racy poems like Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, from a volume called Love and Drollery. And people came, a dollar a head at the door.

A Phoenix Too Frequent, Northern Light Theatre 1978. Archival poster.

Then it happened again. Another “Yes, what a good idea!” from Fenton to the proposal to turn the lecture hall in the art gallery basement into a little semi-thrust theatre. That summer Swan directed four Northern Light one-acts. “I wanted to stretch myself, see what I could do.” The fare wasn’t all comedies:  the company did Pinter, they did a production of 10 Lost Years, Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent.…”

“At the end of the four shows (the debut summer) that we had everything we needed to go forward as a theatre company.” Swan grins. “We had an audience. We had a home. We had a deficit…. Yup, we were legit.”

Swan remembers a woman who came to see Adam and Eve three times a week for the whole run at the Art Gallery, and each time brought a different half-dozen people with her. He and Lysell were curious. Later, when they went to Margaret Byrne’s place for tea, they left with a cheque for $3,000. He labels that kind of spontaneous generosity as ‘pure Edmonton’, too. When Equity wouldn’t wait three weeks for Northern Light’s Canada Council grant to arrive in the coffers, and the show of the day was not going on, Mrs. Byrne instantly loaned them five grand interest-free so they could open. The Edmonton attitude was “hey, I got a day and a dollar for that,” says Swan.

NLT’s relationship with the Citadel was a keynote of the early days. Neville, a bona fide collaborator, “believed in spreading the wealth,” Swan says appreciatively. “When they did Pygmalion, we did (Richard Huggett’s) The First Night of Pygmalion,” a backstage look at rehearsals for Pygmalion. When Neville launched Citadel Too, an alternative second stage a couple of doors north of the old Citadel, he invited Swan and Lysell to do Babel Rap, by the Canadian playwright John Lazarus.

By then the little lunchtime operation had moved into evenings in the reno-ed Edmonton Art Gallery Theatre (“screw it, the audience is with us, let’s do it!”). It was a tricky shallow venue, with limited wing space; ingenuity was required. Swan’s production of John Murrell’s“Waiting For The Parade, “a massive success,” was a case in point. “When the audience arrived, the actors were all on the stage. Waiting. They were onstage for the entire act. Waiting” — a NLT vision of his play that Murrell credited in the published script.

Northern Light was on a roll. In 1980, Edmonton acquired its first summer Shakespeare when NLT put a big red-and-white striped tent in the river valley down by the Muttart (you know it as Folk Fest hill). And they did big-cast al fresco Shakespeare and Shaw under that big top: first year A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale the second.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Scott Swan, 1980, Northern Light Theatre. Photo by Scott Swan.

It was a turning point moment for a new company, its band of intrepid adventurers, and generations of mosquitoes. It was Swan’s first time directing Shakespeare. And for many of the young actors in the company, it was a springboard. Paul Gross made his professional debut in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the forlorn lovestruck shepherd Silvius. Christopher Gaze, now the artistic director of Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, was Touchstone. It was, as Swan describes, a starry mix of up-and-comers and veterans.

The wild thunderstorm that nearly blew away the tent, the actors, and the artistic director on the preview night of Dream is by now legendary. By Act II, as Swan recounts, the wind was 100 km, the rain was horizontal, the costumes were soaked, the tent was ready for lift-off. When the storm abated Swan asked the sodden actors if they wanted to continue. They did. So did the (equally sodden) audience. And the latter “went apeshit,” as Swan puts it, when Bottom (Lysell) began again with “O grim looked night … O night with hue so black.” The cast finished the show in jeans and NLT T-shirts.

The biggest Edmonton success story of the ‘80s was Swan’s ingenious Northern Light production of Arthur Kopit’s Wings, starring the great English actor Ann Casson (a theatre blueblood, the daughter of Dame Sybil Thorndike). It toured the country, played to full houses, gathering awards wherever it touched down. The first reading of the script, originally written as a radio play, left both director and designer stymied. “I have no idea how to direct this; (so) we have to do this!”.  Swan thinks of this as Northern Light artistic logic at its most compelling.

When he went back to his home town in 1982 to run the Vancouver Playhouse School, and open his own studio, he took with him a vastly expanded artistic skill set, he says, and an appreciation of this theatre town of ours that has never dimmed. “You could feel the support of an audience to try something new; to support an adventure,” he says of his time here. “There was this ‘yes, and…?’ here that was absolutely phenomenal.”

“Northern Light and Edmonton let me find out what I was capable of.”

[And the story has continued at a theatre that has had more distinct eras, identities, logos, radical reinventions than any other in Edmonton. Stay tuned for posts on Northern Light’s 50th season finale.]