The Foster Festival: The Bean, written by Norm Foster, World Premiere. Directed by Jamie Williams, with Kirsten Alter and Derek Ritschel. June 20, 2026, Sons and Daughters Winery, Ridgeville ON.
Norm Foster is Canada’s most prolific playwright, with more than 90 plays to his credit. Since emerging as a major theatrical voice in the 1980s, Foster has built a remarkable career delighting audiences across Canada and beyond.
It is often said that on every day of the year, one of his comedies is either in rehearsal or on stage somewhere in the world.
Foster in Toronto?
Despite Foster’s extraordinary popularity, his work is rarely if ever seen on the stages of Toronto’s major professional theatre companies.
Over the years, his comedies seem to have been largely ceded to summer festivals, regional theatres, and community theatre companies, where they continue to attract loyal audiences.
The result is a curious disconnect between Foster’s status as one of Canada’s most frequently produced playwrights and his relative absence from Toronto’s mainstream professional theatre scene.
The Foster Festival
Well, take heart, Toronto audiences, because just an hour and a half down the Queen Elizabeth Way in St. Catharines, there is The Foster Festival. That’s right: a whole festival dedicated to the plays of Norm Foster, now entering its 11th season.
I am ashamed to say that I only got there for the first time last year, despite hearing rave reports about the fine quality of the productions.
The 2026 season features three Norm Foster plays, two of them world premieres.
I happened to catch the first of those premieres, The Bean, near the end of its run, which I’ll discuss in a moment. I will also mention the productions coming up in July and August at the end of this review.
The festival’s usual home is the Mandeville Theatre at Ridley College in St. Catharines. However, the June production is traditionally mounted elsewhere because school is still in session.
This year’s opening production took place at Sons and Daughters Winery, a relatively new addition to the Niagara wine region, making for a thoroughly pleasant excursion into the countryside for lunch and theatre.
The Bean
In his program notes, Foster writes that he loves creating two-handers because he loves writing dialogue, and dialogue makes an audience listen.
Watching The Bean, I found myself wishing for a different ending, yet knowing that Foster had chosen exactly the right one. When a playwright can leave an audience feeling both things at once, it is a sign of a very strong play.
The Bean is a coffee shop where we first meet Cheryl Partridge (Kirsten Alter) and Dennis Hill (Derek Ritschel), with both actors giving terrific performances.
Cheryl is enjoying a coffee before beginning a new job as a receptionist at a law firm, while Dennis has stopped in after dropping off his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah, at school. Dennis strikes up a conversation, and what begins as a casual encounter gradually develops into a series of morning meetings.
Over the course of the play, Cheryl and Dennis return again and again to The Bean, sharing stories, confidences, and the small details of their lives. Dennis, incidentally, works at a plant that bottles oxygen, although his job is on the welding side of the operation.
Dennis’s wife died two years earlier, leaving him to raise his daughter on his own. Cheryl, meanwhile, a woman of a certain age, is recovering from a decidedly unhappy romance. In a standard Hollywood rom-com, the trajectory would seem obvious. But this is Norm Foster, and he has other ideas.
The Art of Foster
What I have always admired about Foster is his ability to write strong female characters, and Cheryl Partridge is an absolute winner.
She never lets Dennis get away with anything. When he reminisces about being a high school football hero, Cheryl dryly recalls that the girls in her crowd had a name for his type: “cementhead.” More importantly, she forces him to confront the realities of raising a daughter on his own.
She guides him through Sarah’s first period, even writing out a shopping list of necessities for the drugstore. She prepares him for buying his daughter’s first dress for a school dance and, more generally, for the challenges and rewards of navigating her teenage years.
Cheryl is practical, perceptive, and utterly unsentimental. In turn, Dennis gradually comes to appreciate just what this strong and insightful woman has to offer.
While The Bean contains plenty of genuine laughs, most of them courtesy of Dennis, what lingers at the end is the feeling that you have come to know two people remarkably well.
That is Foster’s gift: his ability to create character, his ear for dialogue, and his knack for connecting an audience to the people on stage. It is why I wholeheartedly agree with festival founder Emily Oriold’s observation that there is something “uniquely satisfying” about a Norm Foster play.
The Bean is a fine addition to his catalogue, and it has only heightened my anticipation for the festival’s July and August offerings.
The Production
Because the production was mounted at the winery rather than in a conventional theatre, a stage had to be built from scratch.
Set designer Beckie Morris did an admirable job creating the atmosphere of a neighbourhood coffee shop, complete with mugs, coffee urns, newspapers, and other familiar accoutrements arranged along shelves against the back wall, with tables and chairs in front.
One particularly effective touch was Cheryl’s newspaper, which always displayed the day of the week, allowing us to track the passage of time through the series of encounters.
Considering the ad hoc nature of the venue, Morris’s work was complemented by Alex Sykes’s lighting design and Alex Amini’s costumes. With nothing more elaborate than changes of jackets and shirts, Amini subtly conveyed the flow of time.
Director Jamie Williams also deserves particular credit for keeping the staging fresh. The many entrances and exits never felt repetitive, with Cheryl and Dennis arriving from different directions and occupying different tables as their relationship evolved.
Williams also made excellent use of the play’s running gag: Dennis’s daily battle over the sugar in his coffee. The unseen barista, Jocelyn, always gives him less sugar than he wants out of concern for his health, forcing him to add more himself.
As the play progresses, the handling of the sugar becomes a comic ritual, eventually reaching the point where Cheryl simply hands him the container before he even asks. It is a small but telling example of how Williams finds theatrical variety in the rhythms of everyday life.
Foster Festival: The Other Plays
The Foster Festival continues with The Long Weekend (1993), July 9 to 19, and the world premiere of Euchre Night, August 6 to 16, both at the Mandeville Theatre, Ridley College. You can find information and tickets here.
Are you looking to promote an event? Have a news tip? Need to know the best events happening this weekend? Send us a note.
#LUDWIGVAN
Get the daily arts news straight to your inbox.