Family dysfunction explored in prairie period piece

Bittersweet is a word that was probably invented to describe the tangled relationships of prairie families.

Mail Order Bride, opening tonight for a 10-day run at Walterdale Playhouse, is just that and more as it journeys into the true nature of a family's love and loyalty, loss and resentment.

Two St. Albert actors star in this three-generation saga with Bradley McInenly as Charles, the easy-going family patriarch and Josh Languedoc as Art, the fickle travelling tractor salesman.

Written by Edmonton playwright Robert Clinton, Mail Order Bride is a turn of the century memory play. Considered a true Canadian classic, it was winner of the Alberta Playwriting Competition and the Alberta Writers' Guild Drama Award. More than 30 productions have been mounted across the country, but this is the first local one since its premiere at Theatre Network in 1988.

Director Alex Hawkins, a University of Alberta drama professor whose personal friendship with Clinton dates back 25 years, saw Theatre Network's premiere performance. He was mesmerized by the play's evocative abstract quality as the non-linear action moves through time and space. “All the shifting is done by a character's beliefs,” explains Hawkins.

But it was the depth conveyed through dialogue that surprised Hawkins. “There are a lot of unfinished sentences, a surprising amount. Oddly, [what] that means is that what the text is implying is as important as what it says.”

In the script, Charlotte is an agency-screened mail order bride, one of 12 that arrive from the east to marry men they have never seen. Fortunately, she is promised to Charles Teeter, a farmer whose two priorities are work and family. “He's a serious, dedicated man. He's very loyal, almost to a fault. If there were workaholics back then, he's a prototype,” says McInenly, manager at Ric's Grill.

His acting credentials include seven Edmonton Fringe Festival shows and three Walterdale productions. But family priorities forced him to take a 10-year hiatus from the stage, and Mail Order Bride is his comeback.

In the script, Charles and Charlotte share a good life until the Spanish flu kills their only son. Charlotte is filled with blame and bitterness while Charles just loses his focus, and in their grief, they ignore their daughter Rachel.

When Art, a dull-witted tractor salesman comes to peddle his goods, Rachel seduces him and runs away with him. “It's a very quick dynamic that makes it explode,” explains Languedoc, a St. Albert Children's Theatre alumnus.

Although his role is small, he has nothing but high praise for Clinton's concept.

“The moment I read it, it made sense. The subtlety is brilliant. Some lines are short but say so much in the way characters relate to each other.”

Hawkins sums it up as a play “about family and the damage dysfunctional families do to each other and how we overcome it in spite of it or because of it. Because it's so simply told, it's real. It has moments of genuine humour, and if the audience allows the play to flow over them, they'll feel amused by it and they'll learn something through it.”