In her program notes for Scripps Ranch Theatre’s “Mary’s Wedding,” director Kate Rose Reynolds writes that she has had a love affair with the play for 10 years. Now it’s San Diegans’ turn to fall for the dreamy, bittersweet World War I romance drama.
The spare 90-minute play is told on a simple barnyard-like stage, allowing the playwright’s words, actors and the audience’s imagination to fill in the rest. Thanks to Reynolds’ spirited direction, two fine actors and wonderful sound and lighting design, it becomes theatrical storytelling at its best.
The entire play, as the audience is told in the opening minutes, takes place inside a dream that Mary is having on the night before her wedding. All of the scenes are fragments of her memories that slip backward and forward in time and between her real experiences and those she has imagined. It begins in 1914 and ends in 1920.
Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte’s 2002 play was inspired by the heroism of Lt. Gordon “Flowers” Flowerdew, and his company of Canadian Cavalry Brigade soldiers in the 1918 Battle of Moreuil Wood in . Charging on horseback with sabers aloft into a fusillade of German machine gun fire, Company C experienced horrific casualties, but they broke the enemy’s nerve and their advance.
A fictional version of ‘Flowers” is one of three characters in “Mary’s Wedding,” playing a protective leader to Charlie, a gentle-natured Canadian farm boy who’s afraid of thunder and lightning but nonetheless enlists to fight for the British in the Great War. The third character is Mary, a young English woman in Canada who hopes to marry Charlie when he returns from war, despite her mother’s disapproval.
Liliana Talwatte is wonderfully adept at playing two very different characters, the well-mannered but adventure- and romance-starved Mary, and the duty-bound Flowers, who is equal parts stern and paternal with his troops. And Dennis O’Connor is excellent in his theatrical debut as Charlie. O’Connor previously served in the U.S. Navy, and you can see that military experience in his focus, posture, walk and fitness. But he also has a friendly openness and warmth that suits the character.
The war and battles section of the play are told through Charlie’s letters home, which Mary imagines and the audience viscerally experiences through movement by O’Connor, lighting design by Sammy Webster and sound and original compositions by Marc Akiyama. The show’s scenic designer is Dixon Fish and Dawn Fuller-Korinek designed costumes.
Few Americans know that more than 650,000 Canadians and Newfoundlers served in World War I. More than 66,000 died and more than 172,000 were wounded. And in the Battle of Moreuil Wood, Flowerdew’s Company C suffered a 70 percent casualty rate.
Needless to say, “Mary’s Wedding” is a tear-jerker. But it’s also a moving and imaginatively written play that’s well directed, cast and designed in its San Diego premiere at Scripps Ranch Theatre.
‘Mary’s Wedding’
When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through April 27
Where: Scripps Ranch Theatre at Legler Bengough Theatre, Alliant International University, 9783 Avenue of Nations, San Diego
Tickets: $29-$49
Info: 858-395-0573
Online: scrippsranchtheatre.org
