Liz Lauren
Nate Burger and Laura Rook turn in performances that feel authentic and raw.
Despite the promise of the title, the audience never gets to actually see Mary’s wedding in the extraordinary production of Mary’s Wedding at American Players Theatre.
Instead, a barefoot Canadian farm boy in suspenders tells us that the story is only a dream, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. Walking slowly from the back of the house to the stage, he assures us that although there are very sad moments, it is a tale worth hearing.
That reassurance is not necessary, as Mary (a luminous Laura Rook) and Charlie (a fresh-faced, earnest Nate Burger) draw us into the intertwined stories of young love, loss and the horrors of World War I, which will separate the pair forever. On the eve of her wedding to another man, Mary dreams of her first love — Charlie — in scenes that span their entire relationship, blending seamlessly between different settings and times.
In this intensely poetic play, showing at the Touchstone through Nov. 20, much of the action is narrated by the two characters. The poetry of Byron, Tennyson and Shakespeare is used to calm Charlie’s nerves in a rainstorm, to inspire him in battle and to mourn many losses. The poems are also held up as pretty fiction compared to the real-life anguish Mary and Charlie face.
Aesthetically, Mary’s Wedding is magical. The ladders, wooden beams, loft and doorways that frame the barn where Mary and Charlie meet morph instantly into the deck of a ship full of soldiers on their way to Europe, a garden tea party, muddy trenches on the frontlines in France and wide-open fields where the young lovers ride horses together. The set pieces keep the actors in almost constant motion, uniting disparate scenes with clarity.
Choreographer Jessica Lanius’ guidance in movement and dance lift Brenda DeVita’s strong direction even higher, giving the actors a physical language to create evocative pictures of Mary and Charlie astride a galloping horse, noting a beautiful bird flying by, falling into each other’s arms, and first straining against, then delicately accepting the end of their relationship.
These graceful stage pictures are heightened by Jason Fassl’s remarkable lighting design, which infuses each scene with specificity and texture. It creates the green haze of chlorine gas that wafts across the trenches, the golden glow of an idyllic summer afternoon, a stunning starry night and a vision of Mary as an angel in a battlefield hallucination. From the lightning flashes to the flashes of machine gun fire, the stage is constantly transformed.
In a two-person play that dwells almost exclusively in the heightened states of joy in new love, the terror of war and the devastation of death, the actors have their work cut out for them to keep these scenes safely away from melodrama. Fortunately, both Burger and Rook turn in stellar performances that feel completely authentic and painfully raw.
As Charlie reminds us at the very beginning, it’s not an easy to story to watch, but it is emphatically worth taking the journey.
