Audacity’s Architect

Judy Lawrence still has no idea how Brian Paisley tracked her down. She would soon learn he had a way of getting improbable things accomplished.

She was staying with friends in Kamloops, B.C., during a tour with a children’s theatre troupe and had been putting out feelers in hopes of finding a job she could step into after the tour. It was 1988, and although she had never attended the Edmonton Fringe Festival herself, the stories she had heard about this completely unjuried, proudly unconventional six-year-old summertime stage showcase and its free-spirited director and founder intrigued her. Though, she admits with a laugh, she didn’t entirely believe those stories to be true.

Oh, but they were. Paisley showed up, unannounced, at 8:30 in the morning, unfazed to find Lawrence still in her pyjamas, and began interviewing her for a position as assistant Fringe producer. She doesn’t remember how she answered his questions, but Paisley might not have cared about specifics: as he remarked to Lawrence’s hosts on his way out, “Anybody who can handle an interview in her pyjamas is probably the right person for the job.”

Paisley often said that there was so much creative energy zinging around Edmonton in the early 1980s that if he hadn’t organized the first Fringe, someone else inevitably would have invented something much like it. But without Paisley’s mischievous spirit and the boundless trust he was willing to place in artists, it’s doubtful that alternate-universe Fringe would have been anywhere near as special or as durable.

“Brian was a great exploiter of the moment, with a talent for engaging people where they were,” says Paisley’s longtime friend and prolific Fringe writer/director/actor Kenneth Brown. Brown recalls an incident in the early days of the festival when a tough-looking motorcycle gang rode up on their Harleys and trooped into the beer garden Paisley had set up outside a fire hall on Whyte Avenue. (In addition to the Fringe, Paisley might also deserve credit as the originator of Edmonton’s summer patio culture.) He didn’t chase the bikers away.

“Brian asked them to be a presence in the beer tent,” Brown says. “Rather than make enemies of the guys, he made them feel like they had a place, indeed a function, on the Fringe grounds.” The bikers agreed. Leave it to Paisley to take potential Altamont vibes and convert it into Woodstock energy.

By 1992, when Paisley stepped down as director and handed over the reins to Judy Lawrence, the Fringe had already become an Edmonton institution. It was a major driver of the Old Strathcona economy and the springboard not just for a new kind of Canadian theatre but a new kind of theatre audience as well: open to experimentation and receptive to fresh voices. Paisley enjoyed such goodwill in the theatre community that he could have easily stayed on for several decades more, but that wasn’t his way.

“It took a lot of gumption for him to walk away from such a success,” Brown says. “I never got the sense he felt burdened by the Fringe. He was from Northern Ireland, and he saw everything with a little irony. Even his own fame he took as a bit of joke.”

Paisley had always been an innovative writer and director in his own right, and he spent much of his later career turning out scripts for movies and television. He eventually decamped to an enviably scenic new home in southern Mexico, but he never left the Fringe entirely behind. He helped set up Fringes in cities across Canada, creating a circuit of festivals from Montreal to Victoria that provided a steady income for countless theatre artists. And he’d frequently return to Edmonton to see how the festival was doing without him, a ponytailed leprechaun standing 6-2 in his familiar uniform of sneakers, blue jeans and an item from his collection of vintage Fringe T-shirts.

Paisley wasn’t surprised to see the Fringe doing so well without him. “His goal,” Lawrence says, “was to create a forum where it would be safe to take a risk. But that promise was also a challenge to artists. ‘I’m not going to do your work for you.’ He threw down the gauntlet, and it was up to all of us to pick it up.”

It still is.

Fringe Theatre announced on Aug. 21, 2026 its plan to rename the Studio Theatre as the Brian Paisley Laboratory, in honour of Paisley’s vision and lasting legacy.

Lost Ones

Lost Ones is a series that honours local legends and unsung heroes who’ve recently passed. To recommend someone whose story deserves memorializing, email [email protected].

This article appears in the October 2026 issue of Edify