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Mary's Wedding
Mary Chalmers has vivid dreams the night before she’s to be married. She revisits a star-crossed romance with a poor Canadian rancher named Charlie before he was shipped off to the trenches in 1914. Swirling between flashbacks and present heartbreak, Mary comes to terms with the man she will not be marrying.
The story is slight in Canadian playwright Massicotte’s 2002 play. Airy tragedy is telegraphed from the second Mary meets Charlie cowering from a thunderstorm: This one’s a tearjerker. But for all the irksomely predictable elements of old-fashioned courtship (Charlie and Mary fall in love as he escorts her home on his horse. What will Mother think?), the tale is genuinely affecting.
Bissell’s Mary is a charmer, guiding us easily through the hazy transitions among different times and states of reality, milking the lilting prose for all it’s worth. When her strong veneer finally cracks, it’s hard not to empathize. Kenyon’s Charlie isn’t quite as captivating, all gee-shucks and cotton candy, but the simple love he shows for Mary is as pure as fresh milk. Jaymi Lee Smith’s lighting might as well be another narrator, pulling us around the stage and along in time as energetically as Mary. Likewise, Victoria DeIorio’s sound design, a clever back-and-forth between the rainstorms of the couple’s courtship and the guns of the war that separated them, is marvelous.
