For Mary’s Wedding, an intimate play for two actors about young love and death during WWI, designer Brian Sidney Bembridge has turned West of Lenin into a barn. Audiences sit in long rows on two sides of the room, some on chairs and some on bales of hay, facing each other across posts, beams, and bags of feed. “We didn’t think about allergies to hay at first,” said the young woman at the ticket table, “so now we inform people.” Had there been catastrophic sneezing attacks? “No,” she said, “but when we tell some people, they rush to their cars to get their Claritin.” By the end of the production, the theater was filled with wet eyes and sniffling—but the hay wasn’t the culprit.
Sentimental but pulling up just short of maudlin, Stephen Massicotte’s play announces itself as a dream that takes place in Canada in 1920, two years after “the Great War” on the night before the title character’s wedding. “There are sad parts,” says a young man during his brief prologue. “Don’t let that stop you from dreaming it, too.” Mary (Maya Sugarman) and Charlie (Conner Neddersen, who also delivered the prologue) meet in the barn during a rainstorm. She looks like a fairy who left her wings at home—small frame, tender eyes, barefoot in a white cotton nightgown—and he’s a suspenders-wearing, horse-riding farm boy, but when it comes to thunder and lightning, she’s the tough one.
“Shh, shh, it’s going to be all right,” Mary says in a mellifluous, upper-class English accent while he flinches after a thunderclap. “Whenever I’m afraid, I just talk to myself… Do you know any poems?” With her help, he dredges up a few verses of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“Theirs not to reason why/theirs but to do or die/into the valley of Death/rode the six hundred”), and we can sense the first stirrings of an innocent romance across class lines. In case there was any doubt, Charlie gives Mary a ride home on his horse—she groans with not-entirely-innocent-sounding pleasure—to a violin rhapsody by Max Richter that could be the trailer music for a drippy, historical romance by Merchant Ivory. (Richter is a prolific film composer.)
But though Mary’s Wedding provides every opportunity to indulge in manipulative sappiness, director John Langs keeps the production honest with earnest but restrained performances by his two young actors. (This is the first New Century production without any of its own company members onstage.) Sugarman plays Mary as sweet and enamored but not too delicate—she’s got a wry streak in her voice, a mature knowingness that keeps her grounded (and more tactical in her wooing), while Charlie is blown around at the mercy of his capricious emotions. He’s inordinately sensitive to being below her station and inordinately happy when her mother finally deigns to be kind to him—after he announces he’s going off to war. Mary isn’t so thrilled.
Mary’s dream toggles between the progress of their prewar romance and Charlie’s military experiences, sometimes visiting him as a battlefield presence, a barefoot phantom in her white gown. She watches him shoot an unsuspecting German soldier during a patrol, huddle in the mud as the world explodes around him, and charge through German artillery: “We ran through the piles of the killed and wounded,” Charlie tells her. “Strewn out there like old blankets… Screaming and grabbing at our legs as we ran by them… tripping us up.”
Sugarman also plays Charlie’s stiff-upper-lipped superior, Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew (“Try going through your life with a name like Flowerdew” he says when Charlie frets that his and Mary’s names don’t “really ring” together), based on a real-life officer who led a famous charge at the bloody Battle of Moreuil Wood. Tough but protective of Charlie, Flowerdew has his own moments of wartime humor. “Ah, is that what the big fuss was about?” he asks while looking at Charlie’s bullet wound. “You might be able to impress your girl with that… did they use two whole inches of thread?”
But, as Charlie warned us in the prologue, the dream has its “sad parts,” and the sweet but restrained performances by Sugarman and Neddersen tenderize the audience for the hit of its conclusion. Though we can see it coming from the first scene, when Charlie recites “into the valley of Death/rode the six hundred,” the end of Mary’s dream is still moving. People to my left and right sniffled through the curtain call, and one young man—who looked like a vintage bartender with his beard and suit vest—sat stunned-looking, the stage lights reflecting off his wet cheeks. 
