For the first time in its history, St. Catharines’ Foster Festival is producing a script not written by Norm Foster.

Thanks to its Playwright Development Program, the inaugural Fostered Playwrights Festival and a generous contribution from the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) as a part of their tourism growth program, the Foster Festival is extending its season with a fourth production: the world premiere of “Time and Tide” by Jody Stevens McCluskey, from Halifax, N.S.

Rose Murphy returns home to her father, mother and great grandmother, needing to be with them while maintaining the separateness of her new life as writer in the “big city.” As we watch the play unfold, we bask in the light of her parents’ incomparable love and identify with Rose’s own commitment issues as she struggles to find a relationship that measures up to their 30-year love affair. We feel the warmth of every one of her great-grandmother’s hugs, even as Rose squirms out from under the weight of expectations to marry and raise babies.

Over the course of a year, we are invited into the complicated, ambiguous but ultimately joyful and loving dynamics of the Murphy family as they navigate the ebb and flow of life seen through the keen lens of maritime humour.

Jody Stevens McCluskey’s new play shines a bright light on family — the joys, loves and losses that every family endures — while skillfully defining the dichotomy of needing family and needing to be independent of it. With well-crafted characters and sharply defined voices she spins a tale unique and at the same time familiar. She builds a family we love on its own and for the recognition of ourselves in them.

For the third time in the course of four years, Donna Belleville returns to the Foster Festival stage — this time in the role of Nan, Rose’s resilient and irrepressible great grandmother. Donna appeared in the Foster Festival’s “Widow Wonderland” in 2021 and as Clara in “Jenny’s House of Joy” in 2023.

“I’m thrilled to be coming back. I love the folks. And I loved doing Jenny’s last year, working with a wonderful group of women, on stage and off,” she says.

A veteran of the Shaw Festival, Donna is also a long time resident of Niagara-on-the Lake along with her husband, actor/writer Terry Belleville.

“I came to Niagara-on-the-Lake in the mid ’70s to join the Shaw Festival,” said Belleville. She worked at Carousel Players and was part of the group that created the Escarpment Theatre Company (ETC), a joint venture between Carousel Players and Brock University.  

Donna and her family left for Alberta in the ’80s where they lived for 20 years. She returned to the Shaw Festival in 1999 and performed there over 19 seasons and has never left.

“(I) now happily call Niagara home.”

Of all the work she has done over her career she confesses her greatest love is new work.

“That’s why I’m thrilled to be part of Time and Tide. I have such admiration for this beautiful piece, its writer, and the Foster Festival for taking the leap to ‘foster’ new work,” she said.

Donna Belleville along with Raquel Duffy, Rahul Gandhi, Stephen Guy-McGrath and Evelyn Wiebe can be seen in Time and Tide, Oct. 4 to 13 at the Mandeville Theatre. Tickets can be purchased online at www.fosterfestival.com or through our box office at 1-844-735-4832, ext. 3.

And for those also intrigued or impassioned by new works, tickets for the readings of the Foster Festival’s” A Niagara Christmas Carol,” an adaptation by Jamie Williams, are also now on sale. It runs Dec. 6 to 8.