Mary’s Wedding: A beautifully realized, atmospheric production.

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.

So the Kanata production has the feel of a dreamscape. Designer Karl Wagner’s expressionistic set, its weather-worn wood almost skeletal in its spareness, testifies to this. So do Wagner’s evocative lighting, Rob Mitchell’s music and Rob Fairbairn’s sound design.

And so does Emily Walsh’s first appearance as Mary when, in her night dress and standing in the gaunt shadows of a barn, she tells us that, although she is hours from her wedding, she is about to usher us away from the year 1920 and the immediacy of reality into a world of memory. As written, the scene is a potential a minefield that could ambush a less responsive performer than Walsh. But she navigates her way through these troublesome moments with confidence before going back in time to introduce us to her first meeting with Charlie at the barn during a storm.

A comfortable, easy on-stage chemistry is being established early on between Nicholas Maillet’s Charlie and Walsh’s Mary as she soothes away the terror he experiences at every streak of lightning and of thunder. (And, of course, such is the free-association element of play and production that we are also reminded of the roar of artillery.) A credible dramatic relationship is taking shape, one which becomes a deepening love — also, sadly, a doomed one — which is communicated to us through fragments of letters and memory and metaphor. The poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson plays perhaps too obtrusive a role here as Charlie’s love of horses and involvement in a deadly cavalry charge at Moreuil Wood in 1918 find parallels with The Charge Of The Light Brigade, but the play is repeatedly rescued by Massicotte’s sensitive dialogue — and, in this production, by the commitment of the actors to the material.

Nicholas Maillet, a most appealing young actor, admirably conveys Charlie’s gaucheness and sensitivity. In the case of Emily Walsh’s Mary, there is a sturdy honesty at play here — an honesty which eventually makes the characterization all the more poignant when she is forced to re-examine her conduct. It’s an honesty which also underlines her emotional courage when, in the face of loss, she accepts the need to move on. Walsh is also required to shift on occasion into the character of Flowers, Charlie’s pragmatic but sympathetic sergeant, and she does so with shimmering effortlessness.

Unfortunately, the script imposes one troublesome demand on its performers — the horse-riding sequences which see Charlie coaxing Mary to join him on his horse which then carries them away, presumably into each other’s heart. The horse, of course is stationary — at Kanata it essentially consists of a few sticks of wood — on which the riders must imitate the rhythms of a trot and canter — and it doesn’t really work. Part of the problem is that designer Karl Wagner provides not even the slightest semblance of a saddle — just a horizontal pole — so instead of encouraging even some suspension of disbelief in us, the scene leaves us wincing at the thought of how uncomfortable it must be for the actors. The riding scenes are unavoidable — the script demands them — but they would benefit from more stylized staging which would actually serve the play’s sensibility better.

After all, early on, Charlie has told us what kind of play this is: “Tonight is just a dream . . . it begins at the end and ends at the beginning.” And at its best, this Mary’s Wedding makes for a magical and mysterious experience.

Mary’s Wedding

By Stephen Massicotte