Dreaming in Vivid Detail: Jade Bettin's Design for Mary's Wedding

In Stephen Massicotte's Mary's Wedding we follow Mary and Charlie through a dream sequence the night before Mary is supposed to get married. Costume designer, Jade Bettin's, research coupled with her evident passion for the play have produced designs that are detailed and multifaceted. They create a canvas for actors Carey Cox and Myles Bullock to paint their poignant story.

Because the play takes place during a dream, Jade explains that the clothing must be bound in reality, but that there is some leniency. Mary is seen in a white lace nightgown, but Jade explained that the time period worked to her advantage. Many dresses in the 1910s worn during the day were similar to nightgowns. Women sported dresses that looked similar to modern lingerie with a great deal of lace detailing.

The dress worn by Mary is quite personal to Jade. Her interest in costume design was sparked by her mother. Her mother was a seamstress and Jade said she received her first sewing machine when she was in 5th grade. She remembers spending hours sewing together. Since her mother's passing eight

Jade's final rendering.

years ago, Jade puts elements of her mother onstage in the clothes she designs. All of the fabrics, laces, and trims of Mary's dress belonged to Jade's mother, making this design a very special one.

Jade has a deep interest in the intersection between fashion and history. Her extensive research of images can be seen on her Pinterest board here. It's filled with landscapes of Canada and France, images of silky white lace dresses, and clothing worn by cavalry men.

Charlie's costume had to serve multiple functions. Charlie works on a farm and rides horses, so he is seen in a neutral button up shirt, riding pants, and lace-up boots. Jade ensured that elements of his costume would also fit in a battlefield setting with details like his stand collar. Small details such as this indicate a change in character onstage. 

See Jade's personal, adaptive designs for Mary's Wedding onstage April 29th to May 3rd!

Click here for more information or call our box office at 919.962.7529.

Director Cody Nickell on imagining his "dream play," Mary's Wedding

In Mary's Wedding by Stephen Massicotte, two actors come together to create a dream sequence taking us through horse rides, battle scenes and tea parties that ultimately lead to the blossoming of their love. The character Charlie first addresses the audience and makes it perfectly clear that the events to follow are part of a dream. "I ask you to remember that," he says. Director Cody Nickell says the dreamlike setting allows the production to break all rules of time, space, and at times, even character.

Cody had many difficult questions to answer at the start of the production process. The dream moves from place to place quickly, leaving complicated theatrical elements for Cody to consider. While some may see these questions as challenges, Cody chooses to see them as gifts.

"How do you bring to life a horse for a cavalry charge when there is no horse? How do you show a moonlit battle between trenches on the front lines of World War I with only two actors? And maybe most interesting, for all its theatricality, how do you show the simple story at the heart of this play about two young people falling in love?"

While the staging can be difficult, the underlying story of Mary's Wedding is much simpler. It follows the relationship of two young people in love and the Great War that comes between them. To escape a thunderstorm, Charlie, played by Myles Bullock, and Mary, played by Carey Cox, seek shelter in an old barn. In this setting, their vulnerabilities are exposed and we see sparks of love develop between them almost immediately. The audience follows their budding romance, and ultimately, their separation when Charlie is taken off to war.

"It begins at the end and ends at the beginning. There are sad parts. Don’t let that stop you from dreaming it too. " - Charlie, in his first monologue from Mary's Wedding.

The many imaginative gifts the production staff conjures will awaken the imaginations of audience members as well. "This engagement of audience imagination makes the experience active for them, not passive; they become witnesses, not just observers," says Cody. The actors are on a journey, but they invite the audience along to experience the terror and the hope that Charlie and Mary encounter.

Jeff Adelberg's mystic skyscapes and lighting will be a key factor in the quickly changing time, place and mood of the dream sequence. And Cody says costume designer Jade Bettin took initial costume ideas and ran with them, doing spectacular research and paying attention to details that further conceptualize the journey both the actors and audience traverse. Jeff's lighting paired with Jade's period costumes will pique imaginations and transform the stage from a physical space, to a fantastical world with no limits.

Cody says he's thrilled to collaborate with scenic designer Daniel Conway once again. Daniel's set has a circular frame creating a portal through which the audience views the story. This portal takes us from Canadian plains to European battlefields on a dynamic set that will evoke the many settings explored by the young lovers.

Experience the dream of Mary's Wedding with us April 29th to May 3rd!

Click here for more information or call our box office at 919.962.7529.

All's Fair in Love and War

By Karen O'Brien

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

—Lord Alfred Tennyson

Throughout the centuries the likenesses of love and war have proved intriguing. In literature, the idea that love and war belong to a distinctive sphere beyond regular rules of fairness is first attributed to poet John Lyly in his novel Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1579), which forthrightly states: "The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war." A quarter century later, Miguel de Cervantes famously compares the laws of love and war in Don Quixote (1604): "Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and polity are as allowable in the one as in the other." It was in Francis Edward Smedley's novel Frank Fairleigh (1850) that the now famous maxim originally appeared: "All is fair in love and war." Today we are still fascinated by stories about the glories of love and war, particularly when the two are intermingled.

Stephen Massicotte's Mary's Wedding takes us on a poetic journey in which we are led through the intimate terrain of haunted memories that traverse majestic prairie fields, setting the scene for romantic love, and the battle-weary fields of the Great War (1914-1918). We follow young Mary Chambers and Charlie Edwards from their first meeting during a thunderstorm on the Saskatchewan prairie to Charlie's travels across the Atlantic to patriotically join Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians) regiment of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade in England, where he experiences trench life in war-ravaged France. The non-linear structure of Mary's Wedding enables us to theatrically experience simultaneous locations and recurring dreamscapes, which fuse these weighty themes of love and war. The structural and thematic fluidity also imaginatively parallels the fluctuating states of mind of Mary and Charlie as they realize the fragility of love during turbulent times.

Canola Fields south of Leader Saskatchewan

First World War: French lancers preparing to chase German retreat. Their cavalry lance is the same as that used in the 18th and 19th centuries. WWI marked the end of cavalry combat roles.

Karen emphasizes the juxtaposition of the prairie field and battlefield images to symbolize love and war.

In Mary's Wedding, Mary and Charlie quote passages from the poetry of Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), whose Romantic style from the Victorian era inspires them. These allusions add to the poetic features of the play give insight into the characters' thoughts and feelings. Mary's allusion to Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1833, rev. 1842) mirrors her own views regarding the complications of her war-torn love affair. Charlie alludes to "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1870), concerning the heroic but futile charge during the Battle of Balaklava (October 1854) in which two thirds of the nearly 670 men were wounded and killed to gain territory in a Russian position during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Charlie's use of this poem reveals his feelings as he recounts the frightful Battle of Moreuil Wood in which his sergeant successfully leads the patriotic charge brandishing a mere saber against German soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns. Sergeant Flowers is based on Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew (1885-1918), who won the Victoria Cross for his valiant advance that led to the German retreat. Flowers' cavalry charge is the last in recorded military history, and the subsequent apprehension of Moreuil Wood was a milestone in the Great War. To this day, a commemoration is held annually in honor of those who fell during this battle, and plans are in progress for the centenary celebration of Moreuil Wood in 2018. Over 400,000 Canadians served overseas in the Canadian Army during World War I.

In 1915, Major John McCrae (pictured) witnessed red poppies blowing in the breeze over freshly dug graves and was inspired to write "In Flanders Fields," one of the greatest war poems ever written. In doing so, he forever made the red poppy a symbol of remembrance and honor for our war dead.

No battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

—William Faulkner

Mary's Wedding adds to UNC's yearlong academic conversation on the Great War centenary. Through the lens of the relentless terror and suffering of trench warfare, we come to better understand not only concepts of glory and honor but also the stakes of romanticizing them. The cast and artistic team of this production collaborated to create an inventive landscape in which dream, memory and history intertwine, delivering an inspired space to engage our imaginations in this theatrical force of love and war. The production offers an opportunity to experience on many levels—thematically, theatrically, and emotionally—the recurring dreams both of dark and devastating losses and of the great capacity of the human compassion that reverberates throughout our war-scarred histories. As we traverse the haunted memories of those who served and those who were left behind, we have the opportunity to reconsider what is fair in love and war. It is, after all, our voices that will determine the memories and histories of those taking part in our shared future.

Mary's Wedding is onstage the PRC² stage April 29-May 3.

Click here for more info or call our box office at 919.962.PLAY (7529).