'Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz' tells Farmerettes' story on Blyth Festival stage

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Those in the Memorial Hall seats on Friday night were treated to the first-ever indoor performance of Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes at the Blyth Festival. What followed was brave, in the words of Artistic Director Gil Garratt, and fun in a way that befit the subject matter and its characters.

 

Written by Alison Lawrence, directed by Severn Thompson and based on the book by Bonnie Sitter and Shirleyan English, Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz tells the real story of the Farmerettes and, in so doing, tells the stories of a number of real-life Farmerettes whose stories were told in the book of the same name. The theatrical crew has taken real-life, first-person accounts of life as a Farmerette and turned them into a narrative story in two acts with characters the audience comes to know. 

 

In Memorial Hall on opening night, all of the aforementioned artists were in the house, in addition to a number of real-life Farmerettes who served their country by working on Ontario farms in the 1940s. The show goes to great lengths to tell us true stories through real photographs and narrative catch-ups to let us know where characters ended up and how their lives played out. This is all in service to the stories of the real women who did this work for their country, the challenges and tragedies they faced and the successes they found.

 

And yet, with all of that historical context at play, the performance is at its best when it’s funny. The humour of the show is infectious and, with a cast full of young women, many of whom are working some of their first theatrical jobs, their green-ish enthusiasm for the work is a perfect fit for a troupe of Farmerettes who too were green themselves at one time. 

 

So, when a small misstep or a set piece gone somewhat sideways brings about the giggles, it fits, because it feels true to the lives of those young women who would have surely had the giggles once or twice in the fields as they learned what would become their new trade. An impromptu game of baseball, for example, is a particular bit of fun.

 

And maybe it was that game of stickball with fallen peaches on the farm that triggered in my mind - as a baseball, film and Geena Davis enthusiast of a certain age - the world of A League of Their Own, another story of young women in a time of war stepping into shoes they wouldn’t normally wear in an effort to maintain a version of normal life as the rest of the world found itself in such abnormality.

 

That story too found women celebrated far too late for something they accomplished on the home front while their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers were overseas fighting the far. 

 

Autumn Davis’ Dot and Charlotte Dennis’ Jay provide consistency from start to finish, even as the play shifts settings after intermission (think of the vegetable production of “Onion Skins” and the fruit production of “Peach Fuzz”), while the rest of the cast - Shelayna Christante, Lucy Hill, Sachi Nisbet and Alicia Salvador take on multiple roles from one scene to the next.

 

The play tackles many of the experiences of the Farmerettes, from learning about life on the farm to finding the enthusiasm to learn more to the uncertainty of having loved ones fighting overseas and the new-to-many stories of Canadians with Japanese heritage during the time of World War II and the injustices they were forced to live with for too long.

 

The actors, however, are at their best when they’re hanging out, for lack of a better term. As they converse in the fields or in their living quarters, their interactions are genuine and subtle and they seem like a group of friends and you want to spend more time with them. So, while some of the more dramatic aspects of the story may feel, at times, a bit heavy-handed and the fourth-wall-breaking letter-reading narration is crucial to moving the story forward, with really no alternative way to fill in those blanks, it’s the breezy, effortless, light-hearted moments among the characters that stay with you - perhaps because they feel the most true. It’s those moments that so accurately capture the lives of the characters we’re being asked to invest in, rather than a play about the lives of those same characters.

 

Another helpful aspect of this storytelling process - if you’re a regular Blyth Festival patron - is seeing so many new faces. Only Hill has been in a Festival cast before.

 

Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz is the kind of feel-good, rural Ontario story for which the Blyth Festival is so known. It is a play that feels at home either on the Harvest Stage or within Memorial Hall. It also - like recent Festival shows rooted in history, such as The Trials of Maggie Pollock or The Pigeon King or The Wilberforce Hotel - brings a true, underreported story from the area to the stage and, as a result, a much wider audience than local historians or history buffs. 

 

Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: The Farmerettes remains on the Harvest Stage until Saturday, Aug. 31 and then moves indoors from Sept. 3-7.