Ford's Focus: GG-winner Kent Stetson

                             

Kent Stetson: Tip of the Iceberg

By Barbara Ford

As I entered Kent Stetson’s study I felt as if I was stepping onto hallowed ground.  This is where the Governor General Award-winning playwright, appointed to the Order of Canada, sits down at a monster of a desk to create some of Canada’s best theatre, bridging several genres and decades and working with some of the most notable names in the industry.  As one fascinating story after another unravelled in that cozy room, I was enthralled by the richness of his life, his unbridled curiosity and expansive knowledge of Canada’s diverse people and history.  Sipping Earl Grey tea and munching on the muffins he had run out to buy at the last minute, it was abundantly clear that between the research I’d collected to prepare for the interview and the material that was surfacing in the course of our exchange, squishing it all into one measly article was going to be a challenge, but I was up for it.  

Here follows the account of the prolific PEI baby-boomer who grew up in a home without electricity (until he was thirteen) on one hundred and forty acres of farmland, sharing cow-milking and other assorted chores with his three siblings and attending a one-room schoolhouse.

Once Stetson graduated, with a B.A. in Literature, with honours, from the Prince of Wales College, he embarked on the “de rigeur” hippie tour of Europe where he came upon Lunchtime Theatre in Edinburgh.  As soon as he returned to PEI, he started his own in Charlottetown but was abruptly scouted for the director’s program by CBC/BBC while John Hirsch (Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival) was the head of the drama division.  Almost as quickly as he had got into theatre, he was propelled out of it and plunked into television where he made a decent living directing short dramas until early one morning in October, without warning, he sat down to write.  Several hours later, lost in time, he had seven pages of his first play, Warm Wind in China, the first Canadian play to address the AIDS issue at its peak in the mid-eighties.