Walterdale show tinged with hope

The Walterdale Playhouse's newest production is anything but a rural idyll. At its heart it’s a love story full of sacrifice and tremendous personal pain.

Yet The Mail Order Bridethis charming tribute to salt-of-the-earth farm folk is loaded with much more than prairie perils and familial dysfunction. You walk out the door understanding that every individual searches for a place to belong. And all that is needed is the well-watered seed of hope to raise a bumper crop.

Much lauded across Canada, it is being remounted for the first time since its 1988 world premiere at the Theatre Network, originally directed by Stephen Heatley.

Edmonton playwright Robert Clinton sets the story in the first half of the 20th century, chronicling three generations of the Teeter family. Just to make it interesting, he adopts a theatrical mechanism where time and space intersect and all the generations are on stage simultaneously playing out their lives.

Written by a lesser playwright, the abstract script could be a disaster. But Clinton has crafted a story that is serious, funny, sad, thought provoking and ultimately heart-warming.

Under the steady hand of director Alex Hawkins, the tone is unforced and subtle with a simplicity that creates theatrical magic. He has cast a set of actors with great chemistry and raised the performance bar to more than just technical competence. For the most part, the seven-actor ensemble is a finely tuned interlocking jigsaw puzzle full of surprising emotional dynamics.

The two-act story starts with Harold English (Dale Wilson), a cunning old coot planting flowers at the doorstep of his deceased neighbour’s house. The elderly matriarch, Charlotte Emery-Teeter (Syrell Wilson), once a mail-order bride, has died. No one lives in the house and she has stated that all possessions are to be sold and the money donated to the town. However, the will also stipulates that a member of her family must inventory everything.

The angry, pretentious grandson Russell Teeter (Darrell Portz), a jet fighter ace who has never met his grandparents, roars into town all the while bickering with his well-mannered British-born wife Eva (Monica Roberts). It quickly becomes apparent that not only is the marriage in jeopardy, but certain family truths have been twisted through time.

Dressed in heavy overalls, Harold is the utterly charming narrator, the folksy storyteller who breaks the fourth wall guiding the audience through his memories with a sly smile, twinkling eyes and roguish homespun humour.

Harold is the bridge between generations and he knows more than he’s telling. It’s a temptation to ham up the role, however Wilson always reins himself in, creating credible tension with simply a raised eyebrow or a surprised shout.

This family saga is populated with vivid characters such as Charlotte, the mail order bride who risked everything to come out west for the companionship of marriage. We see Wilson’s Charlotte as a bride imbued with homespun elegance and later as a bitter, broken woman who alienates a daughter.

We meet the patriarch Charles Teeter (Bradley McInenly), an earnest young man who is shocked to discover his mail order bride is so much older. But he acknowledges his loneliness, accepts her companionship and becomes a devoted family man. In one scene his loving personality really shines when after a backbreaking day at work he sits on the porch to tell his young daughter a bedtime story.

Then there is Rachel Teeter (Mandy Stewart), the prickly, independent daughter who runs away with a tractor salesman (Josh Languedoc) who promises her a better life in the big city but never delivers.

The Mail Order Bride is painted with an elemental sweep of the harsh prairie landscape that seems to magnify the characters’ loneliness. But like the aurora borealis that makes a brief appearance, it also glows with beauty and majesty.