In 2012, Blanford Billard, then Community Development Assistant for the Town of Isle aux Morts (IAM), approached playwright and director Jamie Skidmore about writing a play on Ann Harvey, a local heroine. Skidmore spent several months researching the subject, and visited IAM on several occasions to carry out interviews with members of the community. The IAM Heritage Society received an NLAC grant in Spring 2013 to bring Skidmore and several professional actors to IAM to workshop the play. The play, Song of the Mermaid, was presented in 2013 to great acclaim in the IAM community, and it toured to Port aux Basques, Grand Bank, Clarenville, Cupids, and St. John’s that summer. In Stitches by Berni Stapleton and Amy House, was also presented that summer, and they returned in 2014 with a second show.

 

Out of the success of Song of the Mermaid, and an ongoing dinner theatre troupe in IAM, Da Koodens, (run by Blanford Billard), the Isle aux Morts Theatre Festival (formerly the Granite Coast Theatre Festival) was started in Summer 2015. During that summer the Isle aux Morts Theatre Festival presented several dinner theatre performances by Da Koodens and Butler’s Marsh by Robert Chafe.

 

This past summer, we once again put off several performances by Da Koodens, as well as Double-Axe Murders by Berni Stapleton, which we presented as a dinner theatre on one occasion, and as a standard performance on two additional evenings. We also brought in Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland’s production of Between Breaths.