Blyth Festival 2024: Charlotte Davis comes from an acting family and has forged her own path

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Charlotte Dennis will be making her Blyth Festival debut and yet, she has some familial history with the place.

 

Dennis is an accomplished actor and theatre professional in her own right, but she comes from good stock in that regard. Her parents are both stage actors: Oliver Dennis and Deborah Drakeford. They are both decades-long performers in some of Toronto’s most beloved theatre companies, including the likes of Soulpepper. When they were first married, they made their way out to a little theatre festival in Huron County that’s celebrating its 50th anniversary season this year.

 

So, for that reason, Dennis is familiar with the work of the Blyth Festival and has made it a goal of hers to work here. Now, she will make her debut as a member of the Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes cast later this summer in the role of Jay.
“I’m so grateful to be playin’ around with this group of women this summer! Thank you so much,” Dennis said in her biography for the Blyth Festival. 

 

Dennis says the Blyth Festival approached her in regards to the role last April. She’s known playwright Alison Lawrence for a few years and, after the discussion began, she started learning more about the play and the story of the Farmerettes themselves and her level of interest continued to grow.

 

Thinking about these young women, many of them in their teens, working in environments that were new to them, all as part of the war effort at home, is something that Dennis found really inspiring. She says she feels so grateful to be a part of such an important project that will further illuminate such a crucial and underreported tale of Canadian history.

 

Furthermore, she says she’s excited to be coming to Blyth to be part of the Festival in its 50th anniversary season. She says it’s a place so many actors, in Toronto and beyond, aspire to work.

 

Dennis grew up in Toronto and felt that, to a certain degree, she was born to be an actor. She tells a story about herself when she was two or three years old as a “precocious young thing” and feeling like she wanted to be an actor like her parents. In fact, when she was asked by people at that age what she wanted to do when she grew up, she always had the same response. “Acting! Do I have any choice?”

 

As the child of accomplished stage actors, Dennis wasn’t just prepared to be an actor at home - she was able to take in a lot of adult theatre at a young age that she feels had a tremendous impact on her life. When she was about three years old, she remembers seeing her father in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and being blown away by him. It solidified her ambition to join the family business.

 

In 2015, she attended the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, a city she absolutely loves and still splits her time between (alongside Toronto). One of her grandmothers had roots in Montreal, Dennis said, so she had that connection. She’s also since linked up with a great group of artists and theatre professionals there.

 

She graduated in 2018 and returned to Toronto, only to find herself a bit lost in regards to the next steps of her life and of her career, not knowing what kind of an actor she was going to be or what kind of an actor she even wanted to be.

 

That picture became clearer, however, in the years that would follow.

 

Last year, she became part of the Soulpepper Academy and, in recent years, she has worked for theatres such as Soulpepper, Centaur, ARC, Headstrong Collective and Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre.