Joel Colodner, Zachary Eisenstadt, Luke Murtha

 

The Chosen, the Lyric Stage’s latest production, is based on Chaim Potok’s well-known novel. Written in 1967, and adapted for the stage by Potok in collaboration with Aaron Posner in 1999, the play is an exercise in nostalgia. It takes us back to an insular Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn during the 1940s. The play is naturalistic with overtones of symbolist theatre, its style somewhat reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It too has a narrator who, like Our Town’s Stage Manager, plays several roles, the most significant the adult Reuven (Charles Linshaw). However, this character is more a device to fill in the exposition than Wilder’s omniscient Stage Manager. Rather than enriching the drama, the awkward presence of the narrator points up its lack, while emphasizing the paltry number of characters.

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Photo: Wendy Wagner

Wendy Wagner, the director responsible for Kanata Theatre’s splendid production of Mary’s Wedding, is right when she terms the play a challenge for all concerned.

Stephen Massicotte’s award-winning drama about young love and the trauma of the First World War is a lyrical mood piece, essentially non-linear as it guides us through the past, the present and — yes — the imaginary. And the delicate touch it requires is honoured in this beautifully realized, atmospheric production.

It’s a familiar plot line — in this instance the love between Mary, newly arrived from Britain, and humble Saskatchewan farm boy Charlie, and what happens when they’re separated by war — but it’s one which can still carry emotional resonance, particularly when the characters are as well defined as they are in this play. However, there’s also a rarer quality at work here. Mary’s Wedding occupies a different plane of truth, with its events and emotions filtered through the sensitive prism of Mary herself.

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Playwright Stephen Massicotte’s storyline is appealing if predictable: boy (Charlie, played by Nicholas Maillet) meets girl (Mary, played by Emily Walsh) just as World War I breaks out. They fall for each other, ride around a bit on a horse (in this case, a wooden prop that no amount of imagination can turn into anything but a wooden prop), share tender moments, and eventually come to the end that too many young couples do in wartime.

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Photo  Wendy Wagner

You can  never forget your first love, even on the eve of your wedding to someone else. This is the starting point of Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding.  Set in 1920, the drama is part love story and part history of one of the lesser-known battles of the First World War.

On the night before her wedding, Mary is dreaming of Charlie, the farmboy who went off to ride into the jaws of death. Still filled with regret that she was too angry at his leaving to join the war effort to say a proper goodbye, she must come to terms with the past before she can embrace her future.

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Poverty has a starring role in Irish playwright Marie Jones’ newest work, Fly Me to the Moon. If two personal care workers, Frances and Loretta, employed at minimum wage to look after Davey, an 84-year-old invalid, had not been so desperately poor, they would probably not even have considered pocketing his last pension cheque after his sudden demise. And when his last bet on a horse race comes in at 100-to-one, they might not have decided to cash in on that too.

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Photo: Andrew Alexander

FLY ME TO THE MOON by Marie Jones, author of the popular STONES IN HIS POCKETS, is a very funny black comedy. Frances and Loretta are home care workers in Belfast who take care of the elderly Davy. Their normal work day takes a sudden turn when they discover that Davy has died in the loo. Their decision to collect his pension leads to one darkly comedic twist after another. It finally leads to their realization that they knew almost nothing about him, just that he liked Frank Sinatra and playing the horses.

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