Uh oh,” I thought when I read a plot synopsis of “Marion Bridge.” “I’m afraid I know where this play’s headed.” We’ve seen enough, read enough, heard enough, lived enough dysfunctional Maritime family drama to know the master narrative—humour and despair underscored with unemployment, alcoholism, violence, and/or sexual abuse. There’s often not much subtlety to the story. Or much hope.
I should have known to expect something finer, more subtle, and more complex from playwright Daniel MacIvor and from the creatively courageous women of the new Beyond the Bridge theatre collective. The elements of “Marion Bridge” are familiar, but the results surpass expectation.
“Marion Bridge” is a brave, funny, moving story of three Cape Breton sisters thrown back into each other’s lives on the occasion of their mother’s illness and death.
Christina Forgeron, newest to the acting stage, plays the “strange” sister Louise and graces the performance with an authentic Cape Breton voice and the pitch-perfect gestures to bring the guileless character to life. Forgeron is a gifted physical comedian, and she communicates most (hilariously or affectingly) in silent moments. With experience, Forgeron’s vocal pacing will come to match her comic timing—as it does in her performances as a singer.
Kathleen Hamilton plays Agnes, who has returned to Cape Breton with a hidden agenda to reclaim a daughter she unwillingly gave up for adoption. The dramatic, sexy, rebellious-but-vulnerable Agnes is a familiar role for Hamilton—I long to see her play against type—but she performs with bravada and still, remarkably, gives the voluble and audience-needy Agnes the grace to cede centre stage to her quieter sisters’ stories in the second act.
Central to the play is Melissa Mullen’s compassion-filled portrayal of Theresa, a farmer and a nun. Mullen is breath-taking and utterly believable in this role. It is through “selfless” Theresa (and Mullen’s deft performance) that we see reticent Louise’s deep need for storytelling. It is through Theresa we recognize the self-rebuke in Agnes’s accusations of self-righteousness and passive-aggressive behaviour in others. It is through Theresa we see the challenge of living a faith in a faithless world.
Theresa, who has chosen a life in a community of sisters, relies on her blood sisters as much as they rely on her. She needs Agnes’s adventurousness and her protest. She needs Louise’s soap operas—and her truck.
The three sisters of the story could have fallen easily into the Holy Trinity of stock characters for women: virgin, whore, and gender-confused. The writer provides basic material to undermine these stereotypes, but the performers do even more to give the sisters multi-dimensionality, under the expert guidance of director Laurel Smythe.
Simply staged in the newly renovated Arts Guild, “Marion Bridge” gave me hope for more drama on this scale, and more drama of this calibre. Beyond the Bridge has set a high standard for the new performance space. I can’t wait to see others strive to meet that standard.
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