You may want to make sure you have lots of tissues available when you see the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s production of Mary’s Wedding, one of Canada’s most celebrated plays, during its 10-performance run from October 25 to November 9.
The romantic historical drama tells the story of a couple’s love affair in the era of the First World War, with playwright Stephen Massicotte using dream and memory as theatrical devices to take the audience to different times and places during the story.
The play opens by introducing the audience to Mary Chalmers, an English immigrant to Alberta who is about to get married. On the night before her wedding, she dreams of the time years before when she met young farmhand Charlie Edwards sheltering with his horse inside a barn during a thunderstorm. The couple fall in love, but the year is 1914 — the beginning of World War I — and expert horseman Charlie volunteers to fight in the war, leaving Mary behind for the bloody trenches of France.
Massicotte’s first full-length play, Mary’s Wedding won the 2000 Alberta Playwriting Competition and premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in 2002, when it also won the Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play and, the following year, the Alberta Book Award for Drama. Since then, the play has been performed more than 150 times in Canada, the U.S., France, Scotland, New Zealand, and Germany.
The Trenton-born playwright spent his early years living on various Canadian Forces bases in Canada and Europe before growing up in Thunder Bay, where he developed his interests in books, film, and art. He later studied graphic design at Sudbury’s Cambrian College and then theatre at the University of Calgary, where he began working as an actor and then a playwright. He was in his early thirties and working three jobs when he began researching and writing Mary’s Wedding, which took him three years to complete.
While the play has only two actors, it has three characters. The third character is Charlie’s sergeant and friend, Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, who is based on the real-life English-born Canadian soldier who died during the Battle of Moreuil Wood in 1918 France and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for leading the last cavalry charge in military history. In the play, the character of “Flowers” is performed by the actor who plays Mary.
Explaining the lack of a third actor to play Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, Massicotte said he intended the play as a two-hander that he would perform with a friend on the Canadian fringe festival circuit.
“That’s why it only has two actors even though there are three characters,” Massicotte told Joe Adock of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2007. “It’s cheap to produce. If you divide an anticipated $1,500 between two actors, it’s a lot better than dividing it among three. I can’t claim that the two-actor solution was essentially a brilliant artistic choice.”
Financial expediency aside, Massicotte says the play was also influenced by two stories of women whose grief after losing loved ones in the First World War was so overwhelming that they never married, as well as his own experience with love.
“This was going to be a war play,” he told production dramaturg Mary Blair of Portland Center Stage in 2017. “However, I was in love when I wrote it, and I thought it was a love to end all loves. This is not that love story but, the more I loved her, the more Mary and Charlie loved each other. The more I longed to return to her, the more they longed to return to each other. So the war play became a love story. I wrote it to forget her and to get her back and to remember her and to let her go.”
In the Peterborough Theatre Guild production, directed by Jane Werger and produced by Jennifer Gruer, the roles of Mary/Flowers and Charlie are played by Justine Christensen and Edward Sweeney.
A Toronto-born actor, writer, and producer, Christensen is a co-founder of Let Me In, a platform through which she produces remodelled “classic” plays for a contemporary audience, as well as hosting accessible Short Film Shares where emerging filmmakers can screen short film content. Some of her favourite stage roles include Kayleen in Theatre at Eastminster’s production of Gruesome Playground Injuries, Rosalind in GBTS Theatre’s production of As You Like It, and Bridget in Nexstage Festival’s production of Cannibal. She has also s appeared on screen in Murdoch Mysteries, Chucky, The Expanse, The Umbrella Academy, and more.
Peterborough actor Edward Sweeney is a former president of The Anne Shirley Theatre Company and has appeared in multiple productions, including at The Theatre On King in downtown Peterborough. He most recently performed for the Peterborough Theatre Guild as Robin Hood and as Perchik in last season’s productions of The Enchanted Bookshop and Fiddler on the Roof, and also played Macduff in Macbeth, the inaugural production of the Electric City Players this past spring. According to the Peterborough Theatre Guild, Charlie in Mary’s Wedding is the most demanding role Sweeney has ever had the opportunity to play.
As for what audiences can expect from Mary’s Wedding, Massicotte noted it’s a “very achy play, but not bad achy.”
“I don’t like to leave an audience in a completely sorrowful mood,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I bring them up with something positive. It’s like I give them a big hug to pull them back together.”
Massicotte also shared an anecdote about his brother-in-law, “a huge linebacker” who was sitting next to the playwright during a performance of the play.
“The lights come up and you can see that his face is wet with tears,” Massicotte recalled. “So he says, ‘It must be really hot in here. My face is sweating. Some sweat must have gotten into my eyes.'”
Mary’s Wedding will be performed at the Guild Hall at 364 Rogers Street in Peterborough’s East City from October 25 to November 9, with performances at 7:30 p.m. on October 25 and 27, October 31 to November 3, and November 7 to 9, and 2 p.m. Sunday matinee performances on October 27 and November 3.
Assigned seating tickets are $30 for adults, $27 for seniors, and $20 for students and are available by calling 705-745-4211 or online at www.peterboroughtheatreguild.com.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2024-25 season.
