Rick Boland performs in Rising Tide Revue in 2003 as a broom explaining how politicians have been 'sweeping things under the rug'.Rising Tide
Newfoundland actor Rick Boland, who fused his passion for history, talent for theatre and knack for political activism into a stream of landmark projects with the Mummers Troupe, Rising Tide Theatre, and Resource Centre for the Arts, died on Jan. 30 at age 70. His health had been declining over the past several years, and he suffered from diabetes; still, his death was sudden and occurred in the Emergency Department at St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital, in St. John’s.
Richard Michael Francis Peter Aloysius (the name he chose for confirmation) Boland was born Aug. 7, 1953, the first of eight children of Jean (née Brown) and Michael Fintan Boland, in Curling, Nfld. When he was nine they moved to nearby Corner Brook. As a teenager he joined Youtheatre, an improv group, obtained his first job (shovelling salt as a stevedore at the Western Terminals port) – and committed what he later called his greatest act of rebellion: coming out as gay to his parents.
But his life was full of self-determined choices.
In 1971, Mr. Boland moved to St. John’s to study cultural anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He joined the Drama Society and met Jane Dingle, Tommy Sexton and Mary Walsh, all of whom he would work with over his prolific career. “I auditioned for a play he was directing and did not get the part,” Ms. Walsh remembered.
Dudley Cox, of the Newfoundland Travelling Theatre Company, then approached him to tour with a show, composed of what Mr. Boland recalled as “three terrible turn-of-the-century melodramas” like The Monkey’s Paw; Cathy Jones was also in the cast, and the January dates caught them in several snowstorms, even marooning their van in a drift overnight near Flower’s Cove on the Northern Peninsula, adding to the artistic misery. But, back in St. John’s, Chris Brookes of the Mummers Troupe then cast Mr. Boland in a school tour of the Mummers Christmas Play. The theatre path lay before him; he never finished his degree.
Mr. Boland, far right, with the cast of Terras de Bacalhau, in 1980.Jim Winter
In the Mummers Troupe he met Donna Butt, who would become his collaborator over the next 50 years. “We had very different skills that combined well, when we were not in a racket,” Ms. Butt joked. With the Mummers they created and provincially toured such milestone alternative productions as Gros Mourn, Buchans a Mining Town, and What’s That Got To Do With the Price of Fish? (which also toured nationally).
Through the early- to mid-1980s, when Ms. Walsh was the program animator of Resource Centre for the Arts, its resident theatre company produced a number of celebrated collective works, which were staged across Canada: Terras de Bacalhau, We’re No Match For No One, Makin’ Time With the Yanks, and High Steel. The plays were created by the actors interviewing people with lived experience, improvising from the transcripts, and building those scenes into a script “in jig time, because we had no money,” Ms. Walsh said. Mr. Boland took special responsibility for gathering and preserving the interviews and drafts.
In 1978, disenchanted with the Mummers, he and Ms. Butt co-founded Rising Tide Theatre along with David Ross, Jeff Pitcher, Glen Tilley and Terry Reilly. Their first show was Daddy, What’s a Train?
The long-standing annual Revue, a comedic program of sketches looking back at events over the previous year, debuted in 1984, and Mr. Boland was soon a fixture.
Perhaps most significantly, even in a career that ticked all the major boxes of Newfoundland and Labrador theatre from the 1970s and beyond, he co-authored Rising Tide’s The New Founde Land Trinity Pageant, a walk-about, site-specific, historical theatre piece set throughout the town of Trinity.
In 1992 the cod moratorium was declared and the provincial government was looking for employment alternatives to mitigate the massive impacts. The Pageant was all the more powerful because of the architectural preservation and restoration efforts of the Trinity Historical Society. Still, locals were initially skeptical that theatre would supply any answer. But both Mr. Boland and Ms. Butt felt strongly about the potential of rooted, activist theatre.
Mary Walsh, right, and Mr. Boland chat under an umbrella during a break in the filming of Hatching, Matching and Dispatching in Petty Harbour, Nfld.Paul Daly/The Globe and Mail
“We were both interested in stories that come from this place, always, always,” Ms. Butt said. “And the Pageant really spoke to rural and economic development, even with a small impact. The theatre we came out of was part of the political and cultural change happening here. You didn’t just do theatre to do theatre. Theatre was a means.”
Mr. Boland often spoke of how theatre could fill cultural gaps. “Somehow we lost our whole history, we lost our sense of who we were, at least my generation had,” he told Newfoundland’s The Sunday Independent in 2004. “I thought it was really important to reinstall that and get people thinking about themselves.”
The Pageant was a success from the start and allowed Rising Tide to grow a full season of works staged in locations throughout the community and a purpose-built theatre. (Alumni include actors Mark Critch and Jonny Harris.)
Mr. Boland’s other theatre credits are too numerous to mention, but Al Pittman’s West Moon had a special place on his résumé; he referred to it “as perhaps ‘the play’ written in Newfoundland” and he was able to revisit his character, Nish, in different productions over the decades.
Despite his extensive time on the boards, he still got stage fright. “That five or 10 minutes before the show starts and you have to go out and make a complete fool of yourself still kills me,” he told The Newfoundland Herald in 2001. “I mean you got to have no shame. If you did, you’d never do it.”
But once he was out there, audiences loved him. They could sense his intelligence, warmth and commitment, Ms. Butt said. His ability to connect with people and his deep understanding of Newfoundland and Labrador stories always came through.
His films included Finding Mary March, Extraordinary Visitor, and The Divine Ryans, while TV roles included Yarns From Pigeon Inlet, Up At Ours, and Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, which spun into the special A Christmas Fury (2017).
In the latter series and Christmas special, Mr. Boland played Phonse, the husband of Ms. Walsh’s character. “At one point he flies out of an ambulance into a snowbank,” she recalled, “and we were all very pleased we got that shot – and then we left Rick locked in the ambulance. You may not know this, but ambulances are soundproof. Thank God [producer] Paul Pope went to check on him.”
Mr. Boland didn’t leave his activism in the dressing room. He was 15 when he first worked on a federal campaign, for Progressive Conservative Jack Marshall – but he then fell under the spell of Liberal Pierre Trudeau, much to the chagrin of his anti-Confederate, and therefore staunchly Tory, family. Soon, though, he moved further left and was a long-standing NDP supporter, including as campaign manager for then provincial leader Lorraine Michael in 2006, and he ran himself in a 2007 by-election.
He was also very active with the LGBTQ community, the Waterford River area, the Native Friendship Centre (now First Light), and the Newfoundland and Labrador AIDS Committee.
Also, being what Ms. Walsh called “a born archivist, a born historian,” he, along with theatre artist and author Andy Jones and musician Neil Rosenberg, worked with the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University to establish the Newfoundland Performing Arts and Archives Project in 1982.
He was nominated for an ACTRA for a role in Yarns From Pigeon Inlet (CBC, 1985), and was named to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Hall of Honour in 2009.
An avid reader of Newfoundland and Labrador novels, and a philatelist with a complete collection of Newfoundland stamps, he also hosted dinner parties that were “out of Gourmet magazine,” Ms. Walsh said. “He had one on his rooftop on Military Road that was the exact dinner they were having at Government House, complete with ices between courses, to clear the palate.
“He was so sophisticated, he had such élan.”
In 2004, The St. John’s Telegram asked Mr. Boland how history would remember him. “I would hope that I effect change through my work,” he replied. “But I’m not vain enough to think that I will matter 200 years from now.”
Predeceased by his parents and his partner, Joe Furey, Mr. Boland leaves all his sisters and brothers and many nieces and nephews.
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