On Wednesday December 18 Artistic Director Gil Garratt announced the much anticipated fifth production that will be part of the 46^th summer season in Blyth: 

How I Met My Husband, written by Alice Munro will run July 29-September 3^rd.  

Penned by the Nobel Laureate herself, this delicate, funny, beautiful play about a young woman, a pilot, and a fateful cake, originally premiered at Blyth Festival in 1976.

A long-time friend of the theatre, Alice Munro’s relationship with Blyth Festival goes back to the very beginning; she regularly volunteered as an usher, appeared onstage as an actor, and for the Festival’s audacious second season, she adapted her own short story, How I Met My Husband, for the stage.  

Gil Garratt says of the piece: “This play is a lost jewel in Canadian theatre: Alice Munro’s only play, she wrote it for the Festival in 1975 and Blyth staged it in 1976, and no one has seen it since. It was never published. Like a dream you forgot you had. I found an old hand-typed manuscript in a drawer at the theatre...and when I read it I knew we had to make it part of our 46^th season. Alice means so much to our country and to this community.  It will be a show everyone will want to see."

Set just outside Blyth in the 1950s, the play follows a young woman named Edie who, after flunking out of high school, goes to work as a domestic servant for a local Veterinarian. One evening during supper, a small airplane nearly strikes the home. The pilot who emerges has a mysterious past, plenty of charm, and a few too many good looks. When he sets up a business in the field next door, flying locals up on sightseeing tours, young Edie finds herself drawn to him. Enter the Veterinarian’s wife, a gossip loving neighbour, and the sudden appearance of the pilot’s hitherto unmentioned fiancée, and this stunning portrait of romance, deceit, quiet desperation, and blue sky ambitions culminates in classic Munro style. It’s a moving, nostalgic, and humorous play about the love we seek and the love that ultimately finds us.

A Canadian literary icon, Alice Munro is the only Canadian writer to have won the Giller, the Man Booker, and the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Munro famously said of the Festival “I always spent part of the summer in Blyth, staying with my grandparents…whenever I went past the Hall, I had a sense of extravagance and excitement, of some formal spectacle that lit up the spacious eventful days before I was born.”

Passes are now on sale for the 2020 season. Call the Box Office at 1.877.862.5984 or online at blythfestival.com. Purchase by Dec. 24 and save up to 23 percent over single ticket prices. Single tickets go on sale January 6 for donors and April 1^st for general public.

Blyth Festival acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Foundation.

For more information, visit blythfestival.com.