Jungle Theater Presents MARY'S WEDDING; Runs 9/18-10/15

The Jungle Theater presents Stephen Massicotte's touching love story Mary's Wedding. Set against the backdrop of the Canadian Cavalry in WWI, Mary and Charlie must surrender their love and their fate to the uncertainties of tumultuous times. Memories of young love weave together through the letters of their long-distance courtship between The Farmlands of Canada and the battlefields of France. Conceptualized as a dream, this heartwarming drama opens on September 18th and runs through October 25th. The Jungle Theater's production will feature local actors Alayne Hopkins as Mary, and Sam Bardwell as the young horseman Charlie and will be directed by Joel Sass.

"Mary's Wedding is a gem of a play," says Jungle Associate Artistic Director Joel Sass. "Massicotte is a gifted storyteller with an ear for detail and imagery that captures the beauty and fragility of life and young love. The play is a lyrical exploration of young hearts as they are broken and made whole again. Romance is very much alive in Mary's Wedding."

Mary's Wedding was enthusiastically received by Calgary audiences and reviewers, and awarded the Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play in 2002, and the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for outstanding new publication. Since its premiere at ATP playRites Festival in 2002, it has been produced across the country: at the National Arts Centrein Ottawa, and at least ten regional theatres, including Victoria's Belfry, Regina's Globe, Thunder Bay's Magnus Theatre, the Brome Theatre in the Eastern Townships, Theatre New Brunswick, and The Eastern Front Theatre. It has been produced in Washington and San Jose, and in Perth, Scotland, and translated into French. Massicotte has also written a screenplay for Mary's Wedding.

More about the Story

It's 1917 or thereabouts, a blithe young Mary Chalmers has moved with her family to Canada from England. She's in love with Tennyson's poetry and soon with Charlie, a sturdy young horseman she meets in a barn during an evening thunderstorm that rolls across the western prairies.

As they shelter from the storm she teaches him to brave out his fear of thunder with martial rhythms from a poem glorifying battlefield valor. He will put her teaching to good use once he enlists with the Canadian cavalry, heeding the call of King and country, and is pinned down in the muddy, bloody trenches of World War I.

Then, on a quiet July night in 1920, on the eve of her wedding, Mary dreams it all again-and this dream becomes the entire 90-minute subject of Mary's Wedding. As dreams do, Massicotte's moving and magical play lives at the threshold between fact and fantasy, where nothing is exactly as it seems, memory slips easily into romance, love and loss intermingle forever, things recalled with things imagined -- Charlie's letters, news from the war. Lyrical episodes of courtship float in and out of terrifying images of battle.

According to playwright Stephen Massicotte, "Mary's Wedding is nothing like the play I set out to write. It was always intended to be a big war story. However, I was in love when I wrote it and the more I loved her, the more Mary and Charlie loved each other. The more I longed to return to her, the more they longed to return to each other in the play. I wrote the play to forget her and to get her back; to remember her and to let her go. Mary's Weddingis 'our' love story with 'their' war in it."

About the Playwright

Stephen Massicotte (Playwright) grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and attended Cambrian College in Sudbury, where he graduated with a Diploma in Graphic Design and Advertising. He then attended the University of Calgary where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. His first plays were short Fringe productions and included The Boy's Own Jedi Handbook, My Life of Crime, A Farewell to Kings: A Banger Play, produced by Ground Zero Theatre in Calgary and Theatre Network's NeXtFest in Edmonton, and Looking After Eden.

His first full-length work was Mary's Wedding, which took three years to research and gestate and two years to rework at Alberta Theatre Projects. In May 2004 Ground Zero produced Massicotte's Spot the Pervertat the Pumphouse Theatre, Calgary - a play set in a porno store and far removed from the romanticism and idealism of Mary's Wedding.

Massicotte currently is researching the life of T.E. Lawrence for a play commissioned by the National Arts Centre. This new anti-war play, The Oxford Roof Climber's Rebellion, premiered at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa and at the Tarragon Theatre in Torontoin the fall of 2006. Massicotte has also written a screenplay for a supernatural thriller filmed on the Isle of Man called The Dark. He has scripted an historical drama about the creation of an opera by internees of a concentration camp entitled The Emperor of Atlantis, produced by the Edmonton Opera Company in the fall of 2004. He has been commissioned to write a play for Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, entitled A Perfect Beast. Massicotte has written screenplays for the cult horror film, Ginger Snapsand its sequels, for which he was awarded an AMPIA. He has also written scripts for the Disney TV series, Honey, I Shrank the Kids, and the CBC's Tom Stone. He is a member of the Alberta Playwrights Network, the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers, and the Playwrights Guild.

About the Director

Joel Sass is currently the Associate Artistic Director for the Jungle Theater. He is also a Minneapolis-based designer and adapter, specializing in new work for the stage and imaginative treatments of classic plays. At the Jungle Theater, his directing credits include Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Hitchcock Blonde, The Syringa Tree, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shining City, I Am My Own Wife, and he designed Last of the Boys and K2. He has also directed and designed many productions for the award-winning Mary Worth Theatre Company-of which he was co-founder and artistic director-including Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's R &J, Crazyface, Valley of the Dolls, and History of the Devil. Other notable credits include Pericles at the Guthrie Theater and Lettice and Lovage at Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Joel is the 2007 recipient of the Alan Schneider Director Award from Theater Communications Group, a national honor identifying an outstanding freelance director. He has also been awarded a 2006 McKnight Theater Artist Fellowship for directing, and a 2006 IVEY award for scenic design. Joel was named Best Director in 2002 and 2008 by Twin Cities' theatre critics, and Mary Worth was named Best Independent Theatre Company in 2003. For three seasons, he was resident assistant director at Theatre de la Jeune Lune, where he worked on numerous world premieres including Children of Paradise and The Ballroom. Current theater projects include The Seafarer for the 2009 Jungle Theater season.

About the Actors

Alayne Hopkins (Mary) is making her Jungle Theater debut. Hopkins has performed throughout the Twin Cities theatre community. Some of the productions you may have seen her in include Red Noses at Ten Thousand Things, Koogoomanooki at Sandbox Theater, The Triumph of Love at Park Square Theatre, and Hiding in the Open at History Theatre. Alayne received her training at Hamline University.

Sam Bardwell (Charlie) is a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota from the Actor Training Program. Bardwell's previous credits include The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, and When I was a Ghost at the Guthrie Theater. He has also performed for Georgia Shakespeare, Door Shakespeare, and Emigrant Theater.

About the Jungle Theater

Founded by Bain Boehlke in 1991 in a storefront space at the corner of Lake Street and Lyndale Avenue in South Minneapolis, the Jungle Theater quickly established a loyal following and received widespread critical acclaim for its productions. In 1999 the theater moved into its permanent home, an intimate 150-seat space around the corner from its original location. In addition to the Jungle's main stage productions of classic and contemporary plays, the theater also maintains community arts education and outreach programs which serve the Greater Metro area, and reflect the theater's ongoing commitment to neighborhood and community.

For nearly twenty years the Jungle Theater has had a substantial impact on the Twin Cities theater scene, having established a reputation for excellence that stems from a commitment to high artistic standards and the contributions of many respected and celebrated local artists. A flagship example of the transformative power of the performing arts, the Jungle plays a continuing and vital role in the Lynlake neighborhood's economic, social and cultural development.

Friday, September 18 - Sunday, October 25

Performances:
Tuesdays ($28) and Wednesdays ($28) at 7:30 p.m.;
Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. ($32);
Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. ($36);
Sundays at 2 p.m. ($32); and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. ($28).

Senior, student and group discounts are also available, and half-price rush tickets are available every night of the week 30 minutes prior to the performance for $10 off the regular price. Tickets are available at (612) 822-7063 or online at www.jungletheater.com

The Jungle Theater
2951 Lyndale Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55408