BF23: With 'The Real McCoy', Andrew Moodie is telling a story that needs to be told
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The history of Canada is replete with fascinating figures worthy of eternalizing, which is precisely what award-winning writer and director Andrew Moodie seeks to achieve in his biographical play The Real McCoy, which relates the story of the wild success and tragic life of 19th century inventor Elijah McCoy.
McCoy was born in Ontario in 1844, the child of parents who escaped slavery and settled near the shores of Lake Erie. He went on to patent many of his own inventions, including some that were essential to the steam industry. Despite his enormous influence on his time, McCoy has been largely forgotten by history. Moodie’s dramatic interpretation of his life was first staged in 2006 at The Factory Theatre in Toronto.
This is the first time The Real McCoy has been put on in Blyth, but it’s not Moodie’s first time working with the Festival - he first performed here in 2007, in the Gil Garratt-directed World Without Shadows, and penned the 1998 play Wilbur County Blues. Moodie is looking forward to returning to Blyth. “There’s so much that makes the Blyth Festival unique - first off, that it really is a theatre for the community, that speaks to the community in a very special way, with such a tight focus on the Canadian theatre experience. Every artist who comes here feels like part of the family. I really love Blyth. I hope The Boot is still around - when my daughter was five or six, she tried the burger there and thought it was huge!” (The Boot, a.k.a. The Blyth Inn, is indeed still around, and is still serving huge burgers.)
Moodie came across the story of Elijah McCoy almost by chance. “I was playing Nöel Coward in Linda Griffith’s The Duchess, and after the opening, a Calgarian approached me, and we started talking about how great Linda Griffith is, and I said ‘she’s the Real McCoy’ and he asked if I knew that ‘The Real McCoy’ comes from a Black inventor named Elijah McCoy, who invented an automatic lubricating cup for steam engines that was so good that people referred to them as ‘The Real McCoy.’”
Moodie was surprised that he had never heard of this influential innovator. “I didn’t believe him at first, because my dad had told me about every single Black inventor, and he never mentioned Elijah McCoy… but that night I went to the internet and found all this information on Elijah McCoy. After that I was like - I’ve got to write a play about this guy!”
The more research he did on McCoy, the more astonished he was that the man was relatively unknown. “He was somebody who, at a very young age, obviously showed incredible intelligence, and during the 19th century, was able to study at Edinburgh University… for any Canadian to do that at a very young age - I was so impressed by that. I wanted the play to be very Brechtian - I wanted it to be epic theatre, larger than life, but I was also adamant that McCoy not be a victim in this piece, because in his real life, he didn’t see himself as a victim. He came up with dozens of patents for many many things, a lot of them had to do with steam engine technology, but he also had patents for water sprinklers and ironing boards - he just struck me as a person who couldn’t stop his creativity, and to me that’s not a victim.”
There may be scant information available about McCoy’s personal life, but Moodie has more than one way to create a character study. “The challenge, when you’re writing a play about a real person, is that people’s lives are not often dramatic… to write about someone, you really do have to explore their life, and look for a thing - the first thing I did was research on what exactly his invention was.”
That invention was an automatic lubricating cup for steam engines. “In the 19th century, steam technology was brand new, like A.I. is for us now. Engineers all over the world were experimenting with it, and it soon became a driver of industry. People would put steam engines in their factories and, of course, people would lose their jobs. The problem with steam is that it’s very corrosive to metal and, for years, nobody could find a really efficient solution to lubricate a steam engine to prevent that corrosion while it was running… McCoy realized that if you attach a lubricating cup to the steam engine, according to the principles of thermodynamics, you can lubricate it while it’s running.”
Moodie hopes that audiences will take away from his show a newfound understanding of one of the 19th century’s great inventors. “McCoy was a man who had great joy and great success, but also had great sadness… you can strive, and want fame and fortune, but in the end, life is about our relationships with the people we love. Life is precious and it is short. It’s wonderful to achieve great things, but hold the people that you love very close.”
Director and writer Andrew Moodie’s The Real McCoy opens at Blyth Festival’s Memorial Hall on Aug. 24.