George Elroy Boyd, who was born in Halifax, was one of the original anchors on CBC Newsworld, a 24-hour news channel that launched in 1989.Michael Cooper/CBC Still Photo Collection
When George Boyd died last month at the Mont Sinai hospice in Montreal, the headlines announced the loss of Canada’s first Black national news anchor, as one of the original team on CBC Newsworld when the 24-hour news channel launched in 1989.
But that achievement came on the heels of another pioneering feat: Mr. Boyd was the first indigenous African-Nova Scotian to have a professional debut on the main stage of Halifax’s Neptune Theatre with Shine Boy in 1988.
Newsworld’s launch on July 31, 1989, was not without its technical snafus, which Mr. Boyd acknowledged in an interview at the time. “We’ve got it, it’s there. The product is there and all we have to do now is work harder to better what we have now.”
His colleague, David Pate, Newsworld’s foreign correspondent at the time, told CBC News Mr. Boyd “wasn’t there trying to be a groundbreaking person – even if he was – that wasn’t what he was doing. He was just someone who had his own path that he was following.”
That path, paved with his dedication to storytelling, led him to turn to writing full-time in the 1990s, garnering credits in radio, TV, film and even songwriting, including the title song for his radio play, God is My Warden.
Few others might have given up such a prominent journalistic day job for the uncertain life of an artistic career, but in trading one kind of storytelling for another, Mr. Boyd followed, and brought, his heart.
As he told Black in Canada, he did what he did because of “the unblemished and totally acid need to write.”
Shine Boy was a musical play about the life of Halifax resident George Dixon, the first Black man to win a world boxing title.
“All of us, that first day, the first read, we knew we had a hit,” said actor and playwright Walter Borden, who had deep experience in civil rights activism, and who played Dixon’s trainer. “We knew it. And we knew the importance of this work. It was not only the first Black work at Neptune, which was extremely important to me, it was the first work by an indigenous Black artist about an indigenous Black subject. It also brought to life an extremely important story. If you knew Africville, you knew George Dixon, but by and large it was a topic most people knew nothing about.”
Another of Mr. Boyd’s plays, Gideon’s Blues, first staged at the Cunard Street Theatre in Halifax (1990), and which Books in Canada described as “an evocative, powerful, two-act tragedy,” follows the titular character as he struggles to find meaningful work, stymied despite his university education, and eventually lured into drug dealing. It was adapted into an hour-long TV drama, The Gospel According to the Blues (2010), by the award-winning filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald. Mr. Fitzgerald was in college and worked the box office during the play’s original run, and “would sneak in the back row and watch the play night after night.”
“A decade passed before I approached George about the rights to Gideon’s Blues,” Mr. Fitzgerald recalled in an email exchange. “I had made other films by then, [but it] was a fairly cinematic story to begin with, including lots of action and visual iconography. George’s writing spoke of cultural conflict, the African experience and the Canadian experience. But it was foremost about making moral compromises and sacrifices for one’s family. A terrific performance by Jackie Richardson [as Momma-Lou Steele] held me rapt night after night, too.”
Ms. Richardson ultimately won the Canadian Screen Award (then called the Gemini Award) for Best Lead Actress in a television movie for the performance she reprised onscreen, “which was a milestone for an African-Canadian actress,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. “George felt good about that.”
Among Mr. Boyd’s other celebrated works was Consecrated Ground, which premiered at the Eastern Front Theatre in 1999, and was nominated for a Governor-General’s Award for drama in 2000. This chronicles Africville, the oldest Black community in Canada, founded on the outskirts of Halifax in the early 1800s, and which was condemned and razed in the 1960s, its 400 residents relocated. The script was published by Talonbooks, which praised the playwright’s “wit and gravity … making us a gift of characters believable in their vulnerabilities, their courage, and their outrage.” It was also included in the anthology Testifyin’ Vol. 11 (2003).
Another of his plays, Wade in the Water, was nominated for a Montréal English Critics Circle Award (MECCA) in 2005 for Best Director and was published by Playwrights Canada Press. It follows former slave Nelson Williams Johns from Civil War-era Georgia to Nova Scotia, where he reunites with his son, and then travels to Freetown, Sierra Leone, confronting slavers in an attempt to protect his grandson.
Le Code Noir (2009), performed at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal, told the story of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, an 18th-century composer and musician in France who was known as “the Black Mozart.” (The title refers to Louis XIV’s 1685 decree that institutionalized racism in France.) The Montreal Gazette declared that the play “enthralls.”
Most recently, the playwright was working on a piece about African-American slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass, tentatively titled The Days of Douglass.
George Elroy Boyd was born June 30, 1952, in Halifax, to Frank Stanley and Mae Winnifred (List); he had four brothers and four sisters. He studied at St. Mary’s University but left early to enroll in the broadcasting program at the Nova Scotia Institute of Technology. He worked as a journalist and radio broadcaster, including at Halifax radio station Q104, where he wrote and read the news, before moving to CBC, and then on to the theatre.
“George was a very fine playwright,” said Mr. Borden. “He was a very intelligent, well-read person to the point where … sometimes instead of dialogue, it would become almost a narrative essay. It’s not peculiar to George among playwrights. It’s the playwright creating words for a character as opposed to a playwright injecting themselves into the character. It’s tricky, it’s dicey.”
Mr. Boyd brought “huge, huge” passion to whatever subject he was exploring, and “was a defender of his words to the nth degree,” said Mr. Borden. “It was very hard to pry some of those words away from him without spending an inordinate amount of time convincing him those words had to go or be said some other way. Many people would say George was difficult to work with, but I didn’t see it that way. Artistic people would not see it that way. I just knew how to talk to him. He was complicated. He was a feisty one.”
This sounds fitting for a playwright who also told Black in Canada his favourite quote was “Thou shalt not make life easy for a protagonist,” one of William Goldman’s 10 Commandments on Writing. “George wasn’t a shy wallflower,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “He was bold. George had a critical eye and authoritative voice, and he was an articulate communicator. He was also very respectful of having another artist interpret his work. "
Among other accomplishments, Mr. Boyd was appointed writer-in-association with Neptune Theatre in 1995, given a similar post with the Black Theatre Workshop in 2002, was invited to be writer-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, and represented Canada at the Rafi Peer Theatre Festival in Lahore, Pakistan. His radio plays included Gideon’s Blues, House of Flowers and God is My Warden. He received an honorary diploma from the Nova Scotia Community College in 1998 and an Atlantic Journalism Award in 1988. And he taught a seminar on the subject of Africville at Harvard University on Feb. 10, 2014.
“I’m sad that George is gone,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. “I imagine he would have had more to say as a writer in these times. But he left a significant body of work that I believe will remain relevant and important for a long time into the future.”
Indeed, Mr. Borden is optimistic that Mr. Boyd’s debut work may soon see a resurrection. “From the day we finished Shine Boy, it was a fight with George to work on Shine Boy. He did many other works which received praise, but I’d always tell him that Shine Boy was the one. He had this push/pull with the work. Primarily, I think he was knocked off his bearings because of the success. He wanted it to be a success, of course, but he did not realize what came with that success.”
Artists who come out of the gate so strongly are always measuring themselves against that boon, Mr. Borden said. “To always have that dangle over their head, it’s better not to think of that at all, or else they can’t do their work.”
As an experienced dramaturge, Mr. Borden could sense gaps in the potential of Mr. Boyd’s work. Shine Boy was considered a musical play – “George could write music himself, and it was gorgeous, gorgeous” – but it was “just shy of being a musical. It needed three more songs, maybe four, either duets or solos, and it would have been a fully fledged musical,” explained Mr. Borden.
“About three years ago he emailed me, saying, ‘I think I want to talk about Shine Boy.’ I said, ‘OK.’ He was ready to talk about it and do that extra thing.” The conversation continued until January of this year. Then it, like everything else, was shut down by COVID-19.
In their last communication, Mr. Boyd shared his cancer diagnosis with Mr. Borden and asked his long-time collaborator and friend to promise to keep his legacy alive. “I said, yes, I would. So it’s time for Shine Boy again.”
Mr. Boyd died of cancer on July 7. He was 68, and was predeceased by his parents and brother Frank. He leaves his sisters Juanita, Muriel, Evelyn and Clara, and brothers Henry, Ivan and Anthony, along with many nieces and nephews. A graveside service was scheduled for Lower Sackville, N.S., on July 27.