BF26: Leann Minogue's 'Dry Streak' brings the 1980s into the 2020s

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Leeann Minogue wrote Dry Streak as a young woman who was, at once, looking for a way to fill the hours and aiming to help a friend in need. Now, nearly 40 years later, the Saskatchewan-based play will be part of the Blyth Festival season.

 

The play was written at a somewhat precarious time in Saskatchewan’s history, Minogue told The Citizen. It was very dry and that, combined with the crisis of sky-high interest rates in the 1980s, spelled disaster for some farms. Farmers there and then, she said, were often wondering if this was the year that the drought would finally break or if they would face losing their farms in the face of that hardship.

 

It was against that backdrop that the story of Dry Streak came to her. She was newly at home on her husband’s family farm and looking for something to help fill the hours and she turned to writing. Always one to have a book in her hands in her later years, Minogue says it surprised even her that the first thing she wrote professionally was a play, given that she didn’t have a background in theatre, but was always drawn to novels.

 

However, the problem that she sought to solve with the project that would eventually become Dry Streak is one that is at the heart of the Blyth Festival’s mandate and what it has been doing for more than a half-century.

 

The story begins with the popularity of rural dinner theatres in that part of the world. Minogue’s friend was running one and wasn’t quite locked in on a play to produce that night. The two got talking and, after an uninspiring spin through many plays set in big urban centres and well-known locations, they began wondering why plays weren’t being written about rural Saskatchewan; why their community and way of life wasn’t being reflected on the stage. (Sound familiar?)

 

From there - and with that in mind - Minogue got to work. She began with the dry growing seasons the community had been experiencing in recent years and then folded in a story she’d heard about an Australian community that was in the midst of a generational drought. There, some of the women of the community had said they’d run through the streets naked if they thought it would bring their community some much-needed rain. And an idea was born.

 

Furthermore, she was able to incorporate at least some of her home life, as she was moving onto a family farm that had been owned by her in-laws with her mother-in-law still living there. The bringing-together of the younger generation with the older generation provided a perfect foundation for the story she wanted to tell and she was soon off to the races.

 

The play was a hit with the dinner theatre audience and then Minogue found herself at a crossroads between returning to her regular life or pursuing the life of a playwright. She decided to give playwrighting a try.

 

Minogue says she was lucky to work with some great theatre professionals around that time that really helped her to craft the dialogue and develop the characters of her first play and that work continued with Homecoming and Bloom, her second and third plays, respectively.

 

And while those shows were produced and found some success with audiences, it has been Dry Streak that has stood the test of time, being produced thrice in Saskatchewan and London here in Canada, as well as in Billings, Montana in the United States.
Then, life interrupted her playwrighting career. Minogue began to focus on agricultural journalism in her writing career and she and her husband started a family, having a son to raise, in addition to taking a more active role with the bookkeeping on the farm.

 

From there, she has been a prolific agricultural writer and a farmer in her own right, producing award-winning content about agriculture in Saskatchewan and beyond.

 

Why Dry Streak has found a regular audience isn’t exactly a question that Minogue can answer, but there’s a level of excitement that kicks in every time she receives word that a theatre wants to produce the play.

 

That was certainly the case when Blyth Festival Artistic Director Gil Garratt called her about producing Dry Streak as part of this Festival season. Minogue said she has been well aware of the Festival for years, even submitting the play to Blyth years ago, but to no avail. So, getting the call from Garratt was a very exciting development.

 

As the process has begun, Minogue says it’s been great not only working with Garratt, but also with esteemed director Kate Lynch, who will be back in Blyth for the first time in over a decade.