Blyth Festival Season

The 2025 Blyth Festival season 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. The funny and thought-provoking 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. June 18 – August 3

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, based on one of Donoghue’s own short stories, 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, complete with plenty of Irish music. June 26 – August 12

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 cofounder 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, after its premier at the Blyth Festival. 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, 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.  July 5 – August 23. 

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, which originally premiered at the Blyth Festival in 2005. 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. July 30 – August 30

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, who founded CKNX and made Wingham, Ontario famous for being the “smallest town in the world with its own television and radio stations”. The play opens 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. August 20 – September 20