Blyth Festival 2024: Celebrated playwright Alison Lawrence wants you to know the Farmerettes

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Alison Lawrence is an accomplished actor and playwright with an impressive body of work, but she had her work cut out for her writing Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes as a joint production by the Peterborough area’s 4th Line Theatre and the Blyth Festival.

 

However, it was a story she immediately connected with, so she enjoyed spending so much time with the characters. 
Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes was Lawrence’s “Pandemic Project” with it being commissioned ahead of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic all those years ago. However, when the global health emergency shut down much of the world, Lawrence continued to work on the play, just in isolation and with a tremendous sense of focus.

 

Lawrence was busy around that time. She opened a play on March 13, 2020, which means she was one of the only playwrights to ever have a play open and close at the same time, though it was through no fault of her own. (The same-day opening and closing is not to be confused with the troubled productions of Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, who was known to have a few one-day runs in his history.) The play was called Too Close To Home and was set to be produced at Theatre Orangeville before things changed.
 

It was then that Lawrence was able to work on Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes. She said the experience was great for her. As a theatre professional, and especially as someone with one foot in the acting world and the other in the playwright world, Lawrence says she often has to juggle so many projects, which is why it was nice to be able to dedicate uninterrupted time to one project.

 

She had nothing but praise for the Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz book, written by Bonnie Sitter and Shirleyan English, but said its structure didn’t necessarily lend itself to being a piece of dramatic theatre with character arcs, conflict and more. Compiled from individual stories, writings and letters, the book is more of an oral history constructed from artifacts than it is a flowing, narrative story. So, while it is historically accurate and full of information, it didn’t have the story that would be needed to put it on stage, which is where Lawrence came in. She created a handful of characters from that treasure trove of information compiled by Sitter and English and brought in different aspects of their lives, different stories, different character traits and made them into a manageable cast of characters that audiences will soon get to know. Of course she has taken certain narrative liberties here or there, but the majority of the information in the play is true to the experience of one Farmerette or another.

 

While she enjoyed the solitude of writing the play and the freedom to focus exclusively on it, Lawrence was far from alone. She was in dialogue with 4th Line Managing Artistic Director Kim Blackwell and Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt and Associate Artistic Director Severn Thompson.

 

The project took a major step forward when they were able to have a workshop for it and Lawrence was able to hear her words in the mouths of actors for the first time on this project - it’s an important crossroads in the life of any play.

 

She also mentioned the importance of a reminiscing session in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, which 15 Farmerettes were able to attend. That event was originally scheduled for April of 2020 and it didn’t happen until three years later, almost to the day. The delay on the project, which has so relied on the remembrances and co-operation of actual Farmerettes, was of significant concern. These women would all be at advanced stages of life and as the world loses them, so too does it lose their stories unless they’re committed to the permanent record in one way or another.

 

Lawrence says that now, after all this time, she’s very proud of what she’s created for the stage, but with it comes a tremendous sense of responsibility to do right by the Farmerettes and tell their story properly.

 

She aimed to structure the play to align with the title of the book itself, writing the first acts as “Onion Skins” in southwestern Ontario with its vegetable production and then “Peach Fuzz” in the Niagara region with its fields of fruit.

 

In addition to her work in the theatre, Lawrence is also an author and essayist whose work has been published in the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and the National Post. She is an alumna of the Banff Playwrights Lab and was a MacDowell Fellow in 2018.
Her most recent television acting was in Amazon Prime’s The Lake, a comedy series that starred Julia Stiles, Jordan Gavaris and Lauren Holly.