Mary's Wedding at The Golden Apple Theatre

My journey through Mary’s Wedding

I’m not going to lie to you. When I first heard about Mary’s Wedding being put on by the Golden Apple Theatre, I was a little dubious. It’s been described as a romance, a love story and a tribute to Canadian soldiers in WWI. Sappy and patriotic is what my brain told me, not something that normally appeals to me. However, when I saw the play last night, from the opening salvo, I knew I was in for a surprise. I was not disappointed. In 90 short minutes (and they are short) I was transported to a rural farm in Alberta witnessing the innocence of  young love during a time when innocence prevailed. Tess Degenstein, as Mary, was delightfully coquettish and very convincingly, a girl in love for the first time, while Jeff Irving, as Charlie the local farm boy with a fear of thunderstorms, made you want to rumple his hair with a smile. But the transportation doesn’t stop there. We also journey with the characters to war torn France at the height of the Great War, a place so different from the idyllic farms that I was amazed at how well it was depicted on a stage with no set changes and costume changes were merely the donning of a coat or a hat.

Because the play is a dream that Mary has the night before her wedding, time overlaps on itself in a way that must have been difficult for the actors but appeared to the audience as seamless. Now, I’m not an actor or a theatre person, so I cannot tell you what made the play so vivid. Was it the acting, the direction, the sound or the lighting? I would guess it was all of these things that combined flawlessly to wrench your heart in quite unexpected ways. I was most struck by the abrupt differences between the characters in their innocence and the characters who knew the wages of war. The transformation of Charlie from love struck farm boy, to terrified young soldier, to battle weary man was what first had tears flowing down my cheeks, despite my attempt to will them away. What was more subtle but equally weighty was the change in Mary as she struggles to cope with Charlie’s trauma from afar, able to see but not able to intervene.

I don’t want to give away too many spoilers because you really need to experience this for yourself. Tess and Jeff are nothing short of brilliant and it is an experience, unlike any other play I’ve attended. You will be moved, you will be horrified, and you will be touched deeply.