Ken Agrell-Smith was a titan of the local theatre community, and looked every bit the part.
Towering in stature, with a prodigious white beard and a brow that furrowed sharply in concentration or anger, Agrell-Smith was once described by a student as “more powerful than the Minotaur.”
A long-time teacher with Edmonton Public Schools, he challenged students with plays from the ancient Greeks, Ibsen and Brecht — and countless other writers whose works were thought-provoking, political, and often considered beyond the ken of high schoolers.
“He never coddled anybody,” said Troy O’Donnell, a student at Harry Ainlay High School from 1982 to 1985. “If it was big, bold and he had a passion for it, he wanted to share that passion. And he trusted we’d have the intelligence to grab on and be able to engage with him.”
Ken Agrell-Smith taught for 38 years in Edmonton Public Schools and spent most of that time as a drama teacher at Harry Ainlay High School. (Supplied/Jennifer Agrell-Smith)
Over the course of a 38-year teaching career, he taught thousands of students. They called him “Agrell,” a less formal sobriquet for a man whose teaching venue was the auditorium, where he pitched in to help build sets with sweat and sheer determination.
O’Donnell recalled that Agrell-Smith was the first person to teach him to use a power saw.
“He’d say, ‘We’ll put this here and put that there.’ And magically [the set] would come together with railings, and spirals and staircases and walls, and nooks and crannies for characters to creep out of. It was just a magical place.”
O’Donnell was among several of Agrell-Smith’s students who pursued professional careers in theatre. One of the founding members of Edmonton’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival, he still works as an artistic associate for the company that has become an institution in the city.
Agrell-Smith’s passion for theatre naturally seeped into his life at home. He and his wife, Heather, were married for 54 years and had four children, Trish, Jessica, Jennifer and Paul.
“I knew about Bertolt Brecht and the Holocaust and that whole style of expressionist theatre from a very young age,” said Trish Agrell-Smith, his eldest daughter.
Ken Agrell-Smith with his children, (left to right) Trish, Jessica, Jennifer, Paul, in Tofino in 1992. (Supplied/Heather Agrell-Smith)
She remembered, with a laugh, the whole family shuffling into the theatre to watch Amadeus in 1984. Paul, the youngest sibling, was about four and Trish, the eldest, was 10.
But Trish Agrell-Smith also remembers her father’s passion for other pursuits, including music, history and art. She described him as a Renaissance man who also loved geology and worked for the Alberta Geological Survey during the summers of his university years.
Years later, the family of six would pile into their Dodge van to go camping, with Agrell-Smith pointing out the geological features of different areas along the way.
Trish Agrell-Smith described her parents’ relationship as built on love and support — and a certain amount of tolerance for the time her father put into the hundreds of productions he helped shepherd onto the stage.
“Growing up, we shared Dad with a lot of people,” she said. After he died, the family was overwhelmed by expressions of love and condolences.
There was just this breadth, this hunger to understand the world.– Pat Darbasie , theatre artist
Pat Darbasie met Agrell-Smith when she was a high school student, and later knew him as a colleague and mentor in the theatre community. An award-winning actor, she used to tell Agrell-Smith she was destined to become a lab technician or a physiotherapist before she met him.
Agrell-Smith could be seen as gruff — he didn’t suffer fools — and was always honest. Long after Darbasie left his classroom, her former teacher went to watch her in plays and offer feedback on her work.
Ken Agrell-Smith as ‘Old Solchuk’ in the 1976 Theatre 3 stage production of ‘Broken Globe’ by Frank Moher. (Supplied/Theatre 3 )
Beyond his work at Harry Ainlay, Agrell-Smith sat as a juror for the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Awards and was a board member of Theatre Alberta. He acted in plays throughout university and with Theatre 3 in Edmonton.
Darbasie thinks one reason he didn’t pursue professional acting was because of the “politics” that can be part of the business.
“He’d rather do his own thing than compromise the art,” she said.
Ken and Heather Agrell-Smith at Chartres Cathedral in France while supervising a Harry Ainlay school trip in the spring of 2005. (Supplied/Jennifer Agrell-Smith)
Agrell-Smith not only offered his critique of decisions made by the directors, but also context for the different elements of the play.
“I could always learn from him, and I learned that evening,” Darbasie said.
His daughter thinks her father’s desire to understand human nature was equally matched with his desire to discuss that understanding — whether through theatre, art or literature.
“There was just this breadth, this hunger to understand the world,” said Trish Agrell-Smith. “And not just to understand the world but he also wanted to be able to articulate and share that joy and understanding.”