Salt Water Moon: A Love Story
While Salt Water Moon is dubbed a love
story, it is most the furious of love, the divine, the epic. Mo Duffy Cobb
tells us more.
Set in the
1920s in Newfoundland, the play opens outside the home of Mary Snow (played by Marli
Trecartin). Her eyes are on the stars, as she tilts her headback into her
telescope. The tension is high as young Jacob Mercer (played by Fraser McCallum)
comes up the lane and into the yard: Mary arches her back, pierces her eyes,
crosses her arms and looks away. “The least you could do is make a fist,” says
Jacob. The audience is immediately drawn into the other side of passionate love
- relentless conflict.
“Black
Beauty”, as her spyglass is affectionately known, spies the satellites of
Jupiter as the two spar through their speckled history, up on Jenny’s Hill one
night they shared together, “the new moon like a smile over the birch
hills.” The two were entwined, satellites
moving towards the same sun, until Jacob up and moved to Toronto looking for
work, at the end of the lover’s summer,. The harsh conditions of the Canadian
Atlantic forced him to move towards responsibility, towards security, towards
freedom. But what happens to the one who stays behind?
The
Newfoundland accents add the depth of culture and the grain of experience to
the play, giving it shape and form. The two thrash between tenderness and
precociousness, each one interrupting the other for the last word, a meteor
shower of words over Conception Bay. Mary, in a fit of haste, has become
engaged to another.
Jacob’s
attempts to woo with silks from “Timothy Eaton’s store in Toronto” fail
miserably next to the raging supernova of Mary’s fiery spirit. But the two are
deeply connected through the threads of time and history, their families both
touched by the depletion of the men of the Newfoundland regiment, gunned down
by German crossfire. They are tied together by the blood of their past—as their
collective unconscious pushes forward the memory of that terrible day.
The audience
discovers an irrepressible chemistry between McCallum and Trecartin that is as impossible
to ignore as a full moon coming up over water. The contentious duo baits their
hooks under their guiding star, Vega, the blue star. They know they’ve both
seen it, hoped for it, dreamed it. But will Fortune steer them forward?
The earthly
distractions of cruelty, jealousy, shame and expectation all play a part in the
bigger picture of love and desire, set against the backdrop of the full moon
and Newfoundland schooner. What the stars have in store for these young lovers
is all the light they can handle.
Salt
Water Moon: A Love Story
Written by
David French / Directed by Melissa Mullen
Until August
28
Kings Playhouse, Georgetown, Prince Edward
Island
