Rick McNair

Rick McNair (1942–2007), was a basketball player and coach. He was the former Director of Theatre Calgary and the Manitoba Theatre Centre and the founder of the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he died in Winnipeg, Manitoba on January 31, 2007.

McNair grew up in Sarnia, Ontario where he was very active in sports, in particular basketball and baseball. Upon graduation from college he began a teaching career that eventually led him into the theatre. While teaching at Galt Collegiate Institute & Vocational School (now Cambridge, Ontario)in the late 1960s and 1970s, he was responsible for establishing the Theatre Arts Program and Curriculum at GCI and a student performance group called the GCI Harlequin Players. Rick was a devoted teacher and had an affinity for recognizing and developing skills and talents in students that surpassed their own self cognizance. He was also one of those teachers who always had time for a chat, school related or not. He also had a close affiliation with The Galt Little Theatre.

Although successful as a teacher and basketball coach, he was smitten by the theatre and in 1977 headed west and joined Theatre Calgary as the director of Caravan, which was a touring theatre troupe that traveled to schools throughout Alberta. In 1979 Caravan was rebranded as Stage Coach Players and is known today as Quest Theatre. McNair's sojourn as artistic director at Theatre Calgary began in 1979 and was characterized by a particular emphasis on Canadian playwrights, commissioning works from writers such as Sharon Pollock, John Murrell and W.O. Mitchell among others.

From Theatre Calgary McNair moved to Winnipeg, where between 1986 and 1989 he was Director of the Manitoba Theatre Centre and where he continued to emphasize Canadian writers. McNair also founded the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 1988 and was an active participant in many small venue productions as a writer, director and actor. His last production was as director of Tom Stoppard's "After Magritte".

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