“Dry Streak” brings together a
veteran of Canadian Theatre,
a newcomer with deep local ties and a lot of laughs.
This summer, the Blyth Festival’s comedy Dry Streak by Leeann Minogue features a cast that includes one of the most pedigreed actors in Canadian theatre alongside a young performer for whom this particular stretch of rural Ontario is home.
The play is a big-hearted comedy about a farming family caught in a generational tug-of-war, and audiences are going to laugh. A lot. It’s exactly the kind of show the Blyth Festival does best: grounded in rural life, and a genuine good time for the whole family.
Benedict Campbell, who plays the patriarch of the Richards family, carries with him perhaps the most storied theatrical lineage in the country. Born and raised in Stratford, Ontario, he is the son of the iconic Stratford actor and director Douglas Campbell and actress Ann Casson, herself the daughter of the legendary British actress Dame Sybil Thorndike.
Campbell studied at the Bristol Old Vic and performed in England before returning to Canada. From 1991, he performed for ten seasons with the Stratford Festival, and from 2003 to 2017 at the Shaw Festival, where his credits ranged from Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, to Lopakhin in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to the titular vengeful barber in the acclaimed 2016 production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Playing opposite him this summer is Brontae Hunter, an emerging actor whose fresh perspective, he believes, is every bit as valuable as his own. Campbell knows that a lifetime in the theatre brings wisdom, but he is equally clear about its shadow side. “There is lots of wisdom in youth, and there is a lot of wisdom in the tested and tried practices,” he says. “The secret, which is not always easy to listen to, is that old and young, the experienced and new, can learn from each other. Keep an open heart and open ears, and you’ll sometimes be surprised by what is there to see and hear.”
Hunter was raised in Bruce County and began performing with the Kincardine Theatre Guild. She went to Sacred Heart High School and Stratford Central, before making her way to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montréal. Her path back to the region this summer was a welcome surprise; she always wanted to work at the Festival. Now, Hunter is delighted to be performing a thirty-minute drive from her childhood home.
In Dry Streak, she plays Kate Allen, the new girlfriend of a farmer’s son who arrives at the homestead with urban assumptions and a vegetarian diet. Hunter has noted with some amusement, a role that mirrors her own life: she is, as it happens, bringing her vegetarian boyfriend home to Bruce County this very summer. “Plays about culture clashes and conflicting world views within a family have always intrigued me,” said Hunter with a smile.
But what sets her character Kate apart is that she doesn’t just stumble through the culture clash; she leans into it, even attempting to join the United Church Women’s group. “She knows the family is being a little judgmental,” Hunter said, “but she has confidence anyway.”
It’s that mix of principle and warmth that gives the comedy its heart.
Hunter’s debut at the Festival came last year, in the hit production of A Huron County Christmas Carol, a show she describes as something of an awakening. It was there, she has said, that she first understood the kind of theatre she wanted to make: intensely collaborative, intergenerational, built for the community it serves. “Even if theatre is not usually your thing,” she said, “you can come to Dry Streak with the whole family, laugh your butt off and have a great time.”
That is the promise of Dry Streak: a wildly funny comedy about belief, belonging, and the pressures of small-town life.
Dry Streak runs June 17 –
August 16 on the Margaret
Stephens Stage at
Blyth Memorial Hall.
