One Good Marriage - Fighting Chance Productions

Sean Reycraft's Play About A Wedding Gone Wrong Gets Its BC Premiere

Oct 25, 2009

One Good Marriage received its world premiere in Toronto a few years ago, and is one of a handful of Canadian plays that have seen the light of day south of the border.

Fighting Chance Productions, who have brought Vancouver audiences The Laramie Project, The Musical of Musicals: The Musical, and RENT, begin their 2009-2010 season with Sean Reycraft's One Good Marriage.

Steph and Stewart are celebrating their one year wedding anniversary, and they throw a small reception, and essentially share the story about how they met, fell in love, their wedding and their honeymoon. One would think that wouldn't be an interesting concept for a stage play, but when they begin to tell the story about what happened when they left the wedding reception, it all starts to make sense.

The small, two person cast includes Jeff McMahan as Stewart, and Becky Shrimpton as Steph. The two actors work well together, but there are moments where they take us out of the story and in a short fifty minute piece, it proves difficult to get back into it. Most of the blame for that has to be put on the shoulders of the director, Ryan Mooney, who has allowed Shrimpton to fly off the handle one too many times. While Steph and Stewart are obviously tormented and haunted by what happened to their friends and family, it seems as though a year after the event there would be some kind of closure for them, but we never really see that. We are bombarded by anger and bitterness, which starts to wear on you after a while.

A play like this needs to focus on the story, and while this production tells it well enough, in the intimate setting of the Rosedale on Robson Hotel's Chevalier Room, there is a certain disconnect between the actors and the audience. This is the type of play that the audience needs to buy into, and believe that they are just as much part of the play as the two actors on stage.

Mooney has done a fine job at keeping the pacing of the show at an almost frantic pace, which makes for a very quick fifty minutes. That certainly helps when Steph and Stewart recount their initial romance, but when we get into the details of the night of the reception, it would have been nice for everything to slow down slightly so when the gruesome details are revealed, the audience has a chance to digest it all.

Overall, this production of One Good Marriage does its best to succeed, and in a lot of ways, it does. Simple is not always better, but in this case, it is, and Fighting Chance should be commended for a noble attempt at a play that deserves more attention in the Canadian theatre canon.

The copyright of the article One Good Marriage - Fighting Chance Productions in Modern World Theatre is owned by Mike Mackenzie. Permission to republish One Good Marriage - Fighting Chance Productions in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.