Blyth Festival's 2025 season to remount 'Quiet in the Land', 'Powers and Gloria'
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
The 2025 Blyth Festival season, officially announced to members late this week, will include four shows indoors at Memorial Hall, two of them world premieres, and one modern Canadian classic produced outdoors at the Harvest Stage with the entire company as its cast.
The season will open indoors with Drew Hayden Taylor’s Sir John A.: Acts of a Gentrified Ojibway Rebellion, which was produced at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre in 2017 and then again briefly at Regina’s Globe Theatre before its coming stint at the Blyth Festival.
In an interview with The Citizen, Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt said that the play is funny and thought-provoking, with Taylor’s trademark edge to which Festival audiences responded with 2022’s Cottagers and Indians and 2017’s The Berlin Blues.
The play follows two young Indigenous men - one a musician and the other someone who loses his grandfather at the beginning of the story - who hatch a plan to recover the deceased grandfather’s medicine pouch from a museum in London. The grandfather has grown up in the Residential School system and had the pouch stolen. To recover it, the men aim to travel to Kingston to exhume the bones of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, and hold them ransom until the pouch is returned.
Along the way, the pair encounter a hitchhiker with his own problems with the founding of the country and Macdonald even makes a cameo appearance.
The season’s second play will make its world premiere in Blyth. Commissioned by the Festival, bestselling author and Academy Award nominee Emma Donoghue has adapted one of her short stories to create The Wind Coming Over the Sea.
The London, Ontario-based author, in recent years, has become a big fan of the Festival, attending many shows and she approached the Festival with the concept for the play.
Garratt says that while it’s based on one of Donoghue’s own short stories, that story is based on real-life letters between an Irish husband and wife around the tail end of that country’s potato famine.
The couple makes the decision to immigrate to Canada, with the husband travelling first and the wife and two young children staying back until the time is right. The pair exchanged letters and Donoghue has incorporated them into the play, along with filling in their story with her own creations.
Garratt said he’s excited to have the award-winning author of Room and The Pull of the Stars aboard this season and he thinks the play will be a special one for the Festival.
In the middle of the season, the third play of the year will be produced at the Harvest Stage, featuring a large cast of the entire company. It will be Festival co-founder Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land - one of the most revered plays in Canadian history and the winner of the 1982 Chalmers Award and the 1983 Governor General’s Award.
The play premiered at the Festival in the 1980s and went on to be produced all over the country. It tells the story of a time of change in an Amish community in a rural area near Kitchener during the First World War.
At its core, Garratt said, the story is about the reconciliation between a father and son, while also exploring being a pacifist in a world at war. A young Amish man enlists in the Canadian forces in World War I and returns and has to make peace with his pacifist community and his disapproving father in the singular, celebrated story.
The fourth show of the season, back indoors at Memorial Hall, is another remount by another Festival co-founder: Powers and Gloria by Keith Roulston.
The show premiered at the Blyth Festival 20 years before its remount in 2005. It was also the penultimate production of a Roulston-penned play at the Festival, with the last time a work from this particular co-founder graced the Memorial Hall stage being in 2006 with Another Season’s Harvest, co-written by the aforementioned Chislett.
Garratt says the intimate story is funny and poignant and has only become more relevant as the years have gone on, dealing with issues like succession planning, globalization, what it means to be part of a small community and keeping your footing in a changing world.
The fifth and final play is called Radio Town by Nathan Howe, which will tell the story of local radio and television visionary Wilford Thomas “Doc” Cruickshank. Howe, who has acted in Festival productions like Wing Night at the Boot, Cakewalk and more, begins his play in the Lyceum Theatre as Cruickshank begins discussions with his children on selling his media empire, only to then reach back and tell Cruickshank’s story from the very beginning.
Garratt said that Cruickshank’s story is so unique to this community and one of true innovation and community ownership that he feels it will find a real home at the Festival and connect with local residents in a profound way.
Garratt says that all of the shows programmed for the 2025 season, in a way, deal with maintaining tradition in a changing world - a concept that’s as relevant as it’s ever been. He also sees theatre as being that bedrock in a changing world, whether it be threats of conflict or ever-changing technology. Garratt says that theatre still provides the opportunity for people to come together, turn off their devices and watch together as humans tell them a story and he says that’s something really profound. There’s a reason that theatre has persisted for generations and generations, he says.