Mary Rose: ...But From Where?

Wallace Shawn was right!

As a prologue to his current Off-Broadway stint in The Fever, Wallace Shawn has a very entertaining riff on the pressures of being a 21^st Century theatregoer.  Among the stress-inducing features he discusses that welcome us before the play begins (announcements of what we can't do, lists of scenes we must familiarize ourselves with) are program notes from the author and/or director that we must read before the curtain goes up so that we can fully appreciate the evening's drama.  My guest and I both chuckled when we noticed the program notes from director Tina Landau as we sat waiting for The Vineyard Theatre's production of J.M. Barrie's Mary Rose, remembering his humorous remarks, but as the lights dimmed and the play began we set our programs aside, along with all thoughts of introductory notes.

Cut to shortly after the performance, as we're sipping too martinis around the corner at Candela discussing the production.  What neither of us could figure out was the significance of the character played by Kier Dullea, listed as "Narrator", who did indeed narrate the proceedings, describing the setting and revealing little details.  Obviously, we thought, Barrie intended him to be a significant character looking back at the events of the play, but although we had a strong feeling about who he was supposed to be we couldn't quite figure it out.  We looked at the breakdown of the three acts, doing the math regarding how many years separated each scene.  Noticing that Act I started just after World War I and then flashbacked 33 years earlier, we assumed there was some Christ-like symbolism going on.  The one place we didn't look, of course, was in the long-forgotten program notes.

The next morning I washed down a pair of aspirin with black coffee, opened up the program, and finally noticed a paragraph where Landau explained that Dullea was not in fact playing a narrator character written by Barrie to be an important cog in the drama.  No, he was just speaking the stage directions.  Yup.  As the director writes, many playwrights of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries were aware that a significant number of people would read their plays instead of, or in addition to, seeing them performed on stage and would write long prosaic passages in between lines of dialogue.  Landau felt these passages were an indispensable part of the piece and incorporated them into her production.

Kier Dullea, of course, has a lovely and very soothing speaking voice and a graceful stage presence, but looking back I can't quite think of anything this narrator's speeches really contributed to the production.  But if anybody ever wanted to produce Kier Dullea Speaks Theatre's Great Stage Directions, hey I'd be up for it.

But on to what J.M. Barrie intended the playgoers to hear.

Premiering in London in 1920, a time when England had just lost a large slice of its young men in the battlefields of Europe and many more citizens to a flue epidemic, Mary Rose is generally seen as a companion piece to his classic Peter Pan (she even makes her first entrance through a window) exploring the mysterious magic of youth preserved.

Paige Howard, one of those willowy and ethereally wispy young redheads, is quite pleasing in the title role.  A Sussex gal, Mary has won the heart of Simon (Darren Goldstein), but her parents (Michael Countryman and Betsy Aidem) think it's only fair to tell him of an odd occurrence that took place when she was a child before they tie the knot.  On a trip to Scotland's Outer Hebrides, Mary Rose once simply vanished.  She was there…  and then she wasn't.  And when she returned three weeks later, she had no sense of any time passing.  And as the play progresses, after marrying Simon and birthing their child, she vanishes once again, for a much longer period and without ever aging.

What does it all mean?  Well, there's the obvious connection between the title character's sudden disappearances and the changed lives that so many Brits had recently suffered when their boys were slaughtered in battle, but Mary Rose too often seems like one of those dramatizations of a classic novel that presents the plot without exploring what lies beneath.  Many interpreters have drawn links between the events in Mary Rose and personal losses in Barrie's own life.  Perhaps Kier Dullea could have spoken of some of their thoughts instead of the stage directions.

In any case, though ultimately rather bland there are some fine contributions to the production.  James Schuette's set, which changes from a drawing room to a seaside setting is charming, as are Michael Krass' costumes, and the wonderful moodiness of Kevin Adams' lights and Obadiah Eaves' sound design and original music are emotionally very effective.

Countryman and Tom Riis Farrell provide some cute comical moments as a bickering pair of friends, along with Aidem as their patient mediator.  But dramatically, this production of Mary Rose lacks the requisite tension and romance needed for a story of lost love and inexplicable phenomenon.  With more emphasis on Dullea's narrator than the intended players, any emotional weight to Barrie's text vanishes here.

Photos by Carol Rosegg:  Top:  Kier Dullea and Paige Howard

Center:  Paige Howard and Darren Goldstein 

Bottom:  Betsy Aidem and Michael Countryman

 

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