Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Sean Reycraft, directed by Shari Hollett
Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
January 23-February 15, 2004
"One Exciting Play"
Sean Reycraft’s “One Good Marriage” was a hit at the 2002 SummerWorks Festival and now receives a well-deserved remount at the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace. The show’s 65 minutes are more thought-provoking and deliver more punch than many recent Canadian plays twice its length.
The action takes place on a completely bare stage except for two chairs. A handmade sign reading “Happy Anniversary” has either started to fall down or has not been completely put up. Actors Jeff Miller and Mary Francis Moore come out of the wings to speak to us as the characters Stewart and Steph. Why they are speaking to us and who we, the audience, are supposed to represent are just two of many mysteries that are not resolved until the play’s final minutes.
As we learn, Steph and Stewart both worked at the Glencoe Senior High School--she as a teacher, he as a librarian. They are two totally ordinary people who met, dated, fell in love and got married. For their honeymoon they chose to go somewhere to be completely incommunicado for two weeks. On their return they discovered that a major catastrophe has occurred killing the more than 80 people at their wedding reception. It would spoil some of the tension to reveal what happened, even though that is not the play’s main point. The play is a mystery but not the kind than can be solved by revealing a simple cause of death.
In a typical wedding a community gathers to witness the binding of two people by love and law insuring continuance of that community. What Reycraft asks is what happens when the wedded couple loses that entire community and are bound instead by death and loss.
Reycraft’s brilliant script balances on a knife edge between horror and comedy as Steph and Stewart constantly evade the very issue that they are trying to confront. Director Shari Hollett carefully maintains that balance and similarly draws crisp but deeply felt performances from the cast. Miller is excellent as on ordinary, outgoing guy forced by bizarre circumstances into the uncomfortable state of constant introspection. Moore’s character is already more withdrawn than Miller’s. Moore well conveys the barely controlled anxiety that lies just below the surface of Steph’s speech. Moore’s tendency to swallow final words unfortunately makes what she says not quite as clear as Miller. Both hand off the story to each other simply as two people telling a story familiar to them both but also subtly evoking the manner of a Greek chorus.
So many modern plays present characters as if they live in isolation that it is refreshing to see a play about the need for community. Steph and Stewart reach out for it through a story whose underlying horror may ultimately deny them precisely what they seek. Reycraft has masterfully captured their nightmarish situation in a play that is sure to have a long life beyond this production.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jeff Miller and Mary Francis Moore. ©2004.
2004-02-14
One Good Marriage