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2007 SEASON
DAVID'S NOTES
Salt-Water Moon
Written by David French
August 2 - 19, 2007
Directed by David Ferry
Winner of the: Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Drama; Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play; Hollywood Drama-Logue Critics Award; Actra Award; finalist for both the Chalmers Award and the Governor-General’s Award for Drama.
David French's Salt-Water Moon has had over 200 productions around the world. French's writing is highly romantic, expressing a commitment to the art of storytelling. It is also as Canadian as hockey.
Against the backdrop of a small Newfoundland fishing village in 1926, the play focuses on Mary Snow (Irene Poole), a fierce young woman with "steel in her heart." Her former beau, Jacob Mercer (Tim Campbell), returns to Colley’s Point from the big city of Toronto to steal her back from her boring and balding school-teacher fiancé. Through conversation, confrontation and recollection, the couple find their way back into each other's hearts.
French’s play is the first part (chronologically) of a series of plays about the Mercer family that includes the groundbreaking naturalistic Canadian classic Leaving Home (recently produced by Soulpepper in Toronto to rave reviews), 1949, and Of the Fields Lately. Salt-Water Moon is the gentlest play of the quartet and answers many of the questions audiences had about the relationship of Mary and Jacob. Truly romantic, it is a glimpse of Eden caught in the moonlight over Newfoundland.
If you liked last season’s Talley’s Folly, you'll love this play. Multiple DORA award winner Irene Poole (Sally Tally in Talley's Folly; Hermia in a A Midsummer Night's Dream; Dona Juanita in Much Ado About Nothing; one of the actors in The Compleat Works of Wm Shakespeare (abridged); Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet) and her real life fiancé Tim Campbell (Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream) co-star in this charming and romantic love story.
RESURGENCE FINDS OVER THE MOON WINNER |
| "This is a lovely play, lovingly written. We’ve not met the likes of Mary and Jacob on any stage in many a long day. You’ll not soon forget them." Hollywood Drama-Logue |
| "Tender as a caress, delicate as a love poem... Tremendous!" Southam News |
| "An old-fashioned love song that is as affecting, funny and as evocative as a dream." The Globe and Mail |
| "It’s a long time since Canadian Theatre has been graced with a play as well written as this one." Ottawa Citizen |
| "Salt-Water Moon Shines." Philadelphia Daily News |
Literary analysis:
Jacob Mercer as a character is a compendium of patriarchal values, and at the heart of Salt-Water Moon is a struggle between two tendencies: one, to uphold the values embodied in Jacob; the other, to resist them. This struggle is not only between the two characters, Jacob and Mary, but is also embedded in the text, and more particularly in the cues given to the spectator as to how the characters are to be looked at.
At one level, the play is based on stereotypical and regressive views of the nature of men and women. The plot is constructed so that Jacob is the one who makes everything happen; Mary reacts. Jacob's behavior is calculated and conscious and completely under his control at all times. Mary's conscious behavior, her rejection of Jacob's advances, is discounted in favour of her involuntary behaviour which reveals 'against her will' that she still loves him. The play assumes its audience's complicity in these assumptions; the performance of the play constructs a position for the spectator, a position that is assumed either to be male, or to accept the male perspective as natural. On another level: within the text itself are contradictions, resistances, to the dominant reading it tends to elicit. Perhaps more significantly, in performance, these resistances can be made truly subversive.
From THE SUBJECTS OF SALT-WATER MOON by Robert Nunn.
Theatre research in Canada: Vol. 12 No. 1 (Spring 1991)
David French's website - http://www.davidfrench.net/
2007 SEASON