PTE artistic director drew from Manitoba mosaic

Kim McCaw, who as artistic director of Prairie Theatre Exchange from 1983 to 1992 helped establish the company’s regional voice, died in Edmonton on Sept. 25 after a brief illness.

A longtime professor of directing, acting and dramaturgy at the University of Alberta who directed more than 130 works during his career, McCaw was 73 years old.

Though his tenure at PTE wrapped up in 1992, McCaw’s creative vision — emphasizing collaboration, taking risks on new works and championing regional and Canadian works — has endured, his colleagues say.

“I truly believe PTE is what it is today because Kim was so instrumental in our growth and development. He really understood the Winnipeg audience,” said Cherry Karpyshin, who joined PTE in 1981 and remained with the company until her retirement in 2015.

“It was watching Kim McCaw direct that made me realize I could be a director, too,” says the company’s current artistic director, Ann Hodges, who was hired by McCaw in the late 1980s as a summer student. “Prior to that I’d always witnessed directors as intimidating men who used big words to make you feel small. Kim empowered everyone in the room.”

Born in Prince Albert, Sask., McCaw was one of two children of Mearl and Gaynel, a social worker who participated in the Great Escape as a German prisoner of war in 1944.

By the time McCaw was in high school, the family had relocated to Saskatoon, where the aspiring actor began collecting accolades before attending the University of Victoria to study drama.

He didn’t stay long: after one year of study, McCaw was accepted by the National Theatre School’s acting program. In school, he met and fell in love with fellow student Linda Huffman. The couple, who raised two children, briefly moved to Toronto before both landing artistic associate positions at Regina’s Globe Theatre.

McCaw’s career was elevated by an offer from PTE co-founder Colin Jackson to become the fledgling company’s artistic director.

Founded in 1972 as the Manitoba Theatre Workshop, the company, which operated out of the historic Grain Exchange Building at 160 Princess Ave., was eyeing growth and expansion.

The young McCaw introduced subscriptions during his first season at the helm, selling 200; by 1986, PTE could count on more than 3,500 supporters filling its seats.

“He was really instrumental in developing a canon of Canadian theatre that would speak to a very specific part of Canada. That was revolutionary.”

“It was still sort of fairly new on the Prairies to have plays about this place. We were to that point still largely producing American or British plays, or maybe plays out of Toronto. He was really instrumental in developing a canon of Canadian theatre that would speak to a very specific part of Canada. That was revolutionary,” says Martine Friesen, who in 1987 starred as the titular Paper Bag Princess in the first PTE staging of works by children’s author Robert Munsch, a lasting tradition McCaw introduced.

In his first season, McCaw’s sense of programming saw the company mix the ambitious historical drama of The Fighting Days by Wendy Lill with fairy tales (David Gillies’ take on Pinnocchio) and young people’s theatre (Julie Salverson and Patricia Henderson’s Beyond the End of Your Nose).

The next year, McCaw leaned more heavily on works reflecting the mosaic of Manitoban experience, including the Ukrainian stories of Ted Galay, an adaptation of William Kurelek’s A Prairie Boy’s Winter — written by Sandra Birdsell, Martha Brooks and Gillies — and Section 23, a satirization of the francophone-anglophone relationship by David Arnason, Claude Dorge and Gerard Jean.

“If I had to say one word to describe Kim, I’d have to use ‘insight,’” says Kelly Rebar, whose Checkin’ Out was one of three plays McCaw produced.

Bill Dow, an actor who worked with McCaw at the Globe, at PTE and during his time with the Banff Playwrights’ Lab, admired McCaw’s direct nature.

“He said — and I thought this was so brave and so true — ‘Listen. I’m going to program six plays, and you’re not going to like all of them, but I guarantee there is something of merit in every single one, and I guarantee you’ll like at least half of them. The ones that you don’t like? I want to hear from you. I want you to come and talk to me and we can have a discussion. That’s what this is about. It’s a forum for opening up ideas, for bringing tough questions to bear and finding other perspectives.’”

McCaw’s style of direct conversation with the audience paid off, with PTE selling 6,000 subscriptions for its 1989 season, the first hosted in the newly opened Portage Place mall.

‘Art belongs in the middle, in the heart of things.’

McCaw viewed the move as an opportunity for PTE to assert itself as a major component of artistic life in downtown Winnipeg.

“It’s a move on our part to seize the centre for the arts and to say, ‘Art belongs in the middle, in the heart of things,’” he told the Brandon Sun in January 1989.

“Right to the end he talked about PTE with such fondness and pride,” says his daughter Maggie McCaw. “He was really proud of what they were able to accomplish, embracing homegrown talent and fostering a Canadian theatre scene. It showed that the audience really wanted that. They were hungry for it.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca