(November 4, 2008)

Attend This “Wedding”

Peter D. Kramer/The Journal News

Theater is best when it makes you forget you're sitting in an auditorium with dozens of other program-clutching folks, when it transports you to another time and place.

"Mary's Wedding," the fall main-stage production of the excellent Hudson Stage Company - running through Nov. 15 - is theater at its best.

Ostensibly, Stephen Massicotte's love story is set in World War I-era Canada, in a troop transport crossing the Atlantic, and in the battlefield of Ypres in Belgium.

But this is a dream play and Massicote weaves a sweet story of first love that floats effortlessly wherever it pleases.

Director Dan Foster has two formidable accomplices in achieving this time-travel trick: As Mary Chalmers and Charlie Edwards, Christina Bennett Lind and Blake Kubena are as charming and memorable as, well, first love.

Jon Kadela's sound design - with thunder that gives way to gunfire and exploding shells - helps to bring us to Ypres and make us wish our hero were anywhere else. Andrew Gmoser's lighting plots complements the sound scheme, and isn't afraid to leave the actors in half-light.

Andreea Mincic's set is minimal but effective - barn-board slats to suggest a barn and a platform strewn with hay bales and sandbags. Joanne Haas' costumes are help to evoke a bygone age.

Jeffrey Klitz's musical underscoring accents a playful moment here or a particularly dreamlike moment there. Klitz's touch is feather light and Foster is right to use this fine tool sparingly and to its full effect.

The overall effect of "Mary's Wedding" is somehow cinematic, a remarkable feat considering how little is actually on the stage. The audience is asked to fill in a lot of blanks - to picture the lovely Lind as a gruff sergeant, to conjure a horse from hay bales, to smell the muddy water in the Belgian trench - but Foster and his exceptional cast and creative team make it an easy task.

At one point, Sgt. Flowerdew warns Charlie not to dwell on Mary.

"Don't think about her too much," he says, "Or you won't be able to see anything else. You'll see her in everyone, everywhere you look."

Of course, since Lind is portraying Flowerdew, the sergeant's point is made. Charlie sees Mary everywhere.

"Mary's Wedding" is achingly charming, sentimental without being cloying.

The play's final moments are as heartfelt and affecting as you'll find.

Bring a hankie - or two. This wedding might very well move you to tears.