By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Mail-order Annie
By Carl C. Cashin
Directed by Danielle Milette (UFV)
Running time: Paired with Tell Me Another Story, Sing Me A Song, total running time 60 minutes
Showings: Saturday at 12:00 noon and Sunday at 6:50 p.m.
Memorable lines: “Get back on the train, girl, go back to where you belong!”
“Lord Jesus, I know I said different wasn’t wrong, just different… but Presbyterian?”
Warnings: Heartwarming fun for people of all ages.
This play follows Annie O’Ryan, (Katherine Beswick) a 28-year-old nanny from Toronto who travels to the plains of Saskatchewan to marry a man she’s only known through letters. The year is 1923, and the Great War is finally over – Annie’s sweetheart was one of the soldiers killed at Vimy Ridge, and answering a letter in a woman’s magazine is her way of seizing the day.
This correspondence leads to the opening of the play and to Annie disembarking a train in the middle of nowhere. The set, as with all Dfest shows, is minimal, but the bench, chalk sign, and Annie’s trunks aptly convey the scene.
Despite the tardiness of the man she is meeting (John Proctor, played by Gabriel Kirkley), she remains stubborn even when the porter, Thomas Rodger (Eli Funk) suggests she’d be happier back in Toronto, as well as her sudden realization that she is a “mail-order” bride.
In all honesty, the first fifteen minutes of the play are an almost violent throwback to Social Studies 10 – some of Annie’s inspirational speeches about the prairies sound as though they were lifted directly from a textbook. Proctor, when he enters, is a breath of fresh air, questioning her health as though Annie is a pack animal, and ultimately inspecting her teeth. Kirkley’s inflection is oddly like that of Stuart McLean – and once you hear it, you can’t not hear it. This lends itself to the insistent Canadian theme.
Personally, I had enough of the Canadian railroad in grade ten – but that doesn’t stop it from being an entertaining show with a feel-good ending. Funk, as Thomas Rodger, presents an adorable, kind-hearted old man, and the juxtaposition between the three characters is what makes this show work as a whole.
