'Dry Streak brings the laughs, rural charm to the Blyth Festival season
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Dry Streak, the lone show in this year’s Blyth Festival season that has already been produced, is perhaps the only light-hearted, family-friendly, wholesome farming theatre experience that also includes the promise of a woman running naked down a small town’s main street. (The Citizen admits to cutting corners on this research, but is confident that, if there are others, there can’t be that many.)
Leeann Minogue wrote the play, one of only a handful she’s written, in the late 1980s. It began as a way to help out a friend and has endured all these years later, being produced occasionally from its home in rural Saskatchewan to here in Ontario in London and beyond. Now, with the steady hand of Canadian theatre icon Kate Lynch on the wheel, it has come to the Blyth Festival.
Like the season-opening Sisters of ’78, there is a good mix of veterans and newcomers to Blyth. Two newcomers, Benedict Campbell and Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski, play father and son Peter and John Richards, respectively, while David Kirby plays local newspaper man Rob Armstrong and Robin Craig plays Olive Richards, Peter’s wife and John’s mother, respectively, after long breaks between Blyth Festival appearances. (Craig was in 1982’s Country Hearts and 2001’s Sometime, Never and Kirby was in The Huron Tiger and His Own Boss in 1978.)
Cameron Laurie and Hallie Seline have both been part of recent Blyth Festival seasons, playing Charlie Richards, another of Peter and Olive’s sons, and Denise (Richards) Smith, a daughter, respectively, while Brontae Hunter plays Kate Allen, John’s new girlfriend. Hunter has been on the Memorial Hall stage before as part of the company of A Huron County Christmas Carol, but this is her first summer season in Blyth.
The premise is this: it’s another dry growing season, so dry in fact that it threatens to be wildly unproductive unless the rain comes (and heat breaks) sometime soon. After some time in the city, during which he fell in love with Kate, John returns home to his rural Saskatchewan family farm to visit (for a little longer than initially planned, we quickly learn) his parents, Peter and Olive. Kate is a bit unique in this traditional farming town due to her eccentric dress, vegetarian preferences and love for punk and post-punk bands like The Cure, Jane’s Addiction, Dead Kennedys and more. Kate’s off-handed comment about running through the town naked to celebrate a rain - if it ever comes - grows legs and becomes a talking point in town, with some grasping on the opportunism of it all.
The cast has a lot of fun with the material, which is often humorous, but always has the heart of the farm at its centre. There is talk of neighbours and friends who have had to sell their farms because of the annual droughts during that time, so the farm is always part of the story, even when it’s not.
This is conveyed smartly through the set design too, as the farm house set moves downstage when it’s the backdrop for the scene and upstage when other locations, such as a local bar or the town’s main street, are being utilized, but, in a clever nod to the storytelling (and likely for practical ease) the farm house always hangs over the action of the play, emulating how those on stage must feel. From a visual perspective, with the set being framed smartly and lit in an evocative manner, it’s technically dazzling whenever the farm house set moves from one spot to another.
Campbell provides a solid foundation for the play and fulfills the promise that was made by Festival folks who would whisper about him being a big addition to this year’s season. He is excellent as Peter, toggling effortlessly between drama and comedy, depending on the scene. Craig plays a perfect foil to Campbell as she brings along an open mind to her son’s new relationship that Campbell can’t quite muster.
Shepherd-Gawinski plays the son torn between two worlds well, while Hunter clearly has fun as the free-spirited Kate who attracts attention in town, good or bad, everywhere she goes, much to her indifference.
Seline plays the frazzled, yet well-intentioned mother of young ones well, while Laurie is great as the more outgoing son who’s busy getting his foot in the door of a local radio station and Kirby has a lot of fun as the local newspaper man, mayor, etc., perfectly wearing the “don’t shoot the messenger” armour that is required to be a successful local newspaper reporter.
Lynch and her creative team then work well to pull it all together, creating a late 1980s time capsule that is both of its time and perfectly transferrable between then, now and every time in between.
The play could maybe be accused of being a bit slow to get going, heavy on set-up and heavy interfamilial conversations, but the second act of the play sends the story down a hill and, by the end, there’s no stopping it, making for a fun night at the theatre, to put it simply.
Dry Streak is on the Memorial Hall stage until Sunday, Aug. 16.