Laurie Lynd

Director
male
Born
1959
in
Toronto , ON
Canada
,
Ontario CA
Lives in
Toronto , ON
Canada
,
Ontario CA
Biography

Toronto-based Lynd is best known for his prizewinning trilogy of gay male narrative miniatures, the breakup musical Together and Apart (1985), R.S.V.P. (1991, 23), and The Fairy Who Didn't Want to Be a Fairy Anymore (1992, Genie, Best Short Fiction). Their masterful orchestration of music and affect is not surprising, given Lynd's acknowledged inspiration in Virginia Woolf, Barbra Streisand and Julie Andrews, and R.S.V.P. is arguably the masterpiece. Thanks to the Pandemic, the 1980s and 1990s were drowning in elegies, an ancient art form that that lost generation had to reinvent. But this short fiction about the lover, friends and family of a Toronto man who has died of AIDS is perhaps the simplest, and the most beautiful and heartfelt of all. Thanks to CBC Radio, the deceased man's musical request becomes a posthumous reminder not only of his personal taste but also of music's power to heal, and, thanks to the broadcaster's national constituency across the time-zone grid, the song is a repeated ritual new listeners are added each hour to the community of the grieving. R.S.V.P. reached an international audience as part of the 1993 package Boys' Shorts: The New Queer Cinema(See (R of T, ch. 9)).

Daniel MacIvor's performances are foundations for both R.S.V.P. and the whimsical allegory of self-hatred and affirmation Fairy. The collaboration of director and actor continued with Lynd's adaptation of MacIvor's one-person play House in 1995, funded like Fairy through the CFC. Built on the actor's provocative sensibility and stage charisma, House received mixed reviews, and Lynd moved on to directing mostly TV episodes (Queer as Folk, DeGrassi: The Next Generation) and TV films (the children's fantasy I Was a Rat, BBC/CBC, 2002; and the NB health care social melodrama Open Heart, 2004).