Gil Garratt, artistic director of the Blyth Festival, announced that a play by the Nobel Laureate Alice Munro, “How I Met My Husband,” will run July 29-September 3rd.

A long-time friend of the theatre, Alice Munro’s relationship with the Blyth Festival goes back to the very beginning; she regularly volunteered as an usher and appeared on stage as an actor.

During the Festival’s audacious second season, Munro adapted her own short story, “How I Met My Husband,” for the stage.

The rarely seen work is a delicate, funny play about a young woman, a pilot, and a fateful cake.

Garratt says of the play, “This play is a lost jewel in Canadian theatre.”

“How I Met My Husband” was never published, and therefore hasn’t been seen since it was first performed at Blyth in 1976.

Says Garratt, “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 46th season. Alice means so much to our country and to this community. ”

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 and quiet desperation 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.”

Details, Details:
How I Met My Husband
The Blyth Festival
July 29-September 3rd
Call the Box Office at 877-862-5984
Purchase online at blythfestival.com