Philly Fringe 2018: PAC presents J.M. Barrie's 'Mary Rose'

Barrie penned this ethereal tale in 1920, some 16 years after gaining fame and acclaim with Peter Pan. The two works share several common themes, with a particular focus on that strange, liminal space between the wonders of childhood and the realities of adulthood. Each play features a character who traverses the boundaries of time.

The difference lies in the telling. Peter Pan boldly proclaims the pleasure he takes in eternal youth. Mary Rose Morland, the wispy heroine of this late-career masterpiece, has no conception of her arrested development. That fact infuses the play with a bone-deep sadness that pervades even its lighter moments, of which there are many.

Not of this world

In Claire Moyer’s brisk production, staged on the grounds of West Philadelphia's Woodlands Mansion and Cemetery, we first meet Mary Rose (Emily R. Johnson) as a fluttery, impulsive 18-year-old. She seems young for her age, bounding about her family’s drawing room with irrepressible energy, fresh from climbing an apple tree. The simple white dress she wears (costumes by Robin I. Shane) can barely contain her.

She informs her indulgent parents (John Lopes and Susan Giddings) that her childhood friend Simon Blake (Adam Hammet) intends to propose marriage. This seemingly happy news leads to a revelation about the young girl’s past.

Seven years earlier, the Morlands tell Simon, Mary Rose vanished for three weeks while the family vacationed on a remote Scottish isle. She returned with no sense that any time had passed.

Barrie never explicitly explores the meaning of Mary Rose’s disappearance, and Johnson’s performance beautifully leans into this ambiguity. It becomes a metaphor for the young woman’s apparent lack of tether to the corporeal plane.

Even as Mary Rose marries and becomes a mother, she retains a countenance at once childlike and haunted. Johnson moves fluidly between proper bearing and youthful glee, all while foregrounding a sense that Mary Rose is not of this world.

Lessons learned

Anita Holland extends that supernatural sense as the evening’s narrator. A prior production at New York’s Vineyard Theatre introduced the concept of an actor reciting Barrie’s poetic stage directions between scenes, and with good reason – the language is beautiful. But Moyer does much to integrate Holland into the action, rather than leaving the narrator a passive participant.

Holland moves impishly throughout the scenes, sometimes controlling the action like a mercurial ringmaster. The specificity of some stage directions occasionally impedes acting choices – as when Holland announces an action before it’s performed – but Holland never pulls focus from the scene at hand. Their presence is so precisely assimilated I cannot imagine the play without it.

PAC has learned a great deal about site-specific staging since last Fringe’s Iphigenia at Aulis, which they presented on board the USS Olympia. That production failed to use the boat to its full capacity, mostly segregating the action to a contained area that replicated a traditional theater space. Here, Moyer and production designer Kate St. John make marvelous use of the mansion and grounds to fully immerse the audience in Mary Rose’s world.

At the first preview, the audience moved from Act I’s stuffy drawing room to a verdant patch of grass on the Woodlands lawn for Act II, meant to represent the island where Mary Rose dematerialized. Welcome gusts of cool air stood in for the loch breeze, and a chorus of buzzing bugs and flitting flies underscored the dialogue. The change of scenery enhances the experience of the play and facilitates a stunning, act-ending coup de théâtre I won’t soon forget.

Mary Rose further benefits from fine supporting performances by Chase Byrd, Jahzeer Terrell, and the invaluable Corinna Burns, and an appropriately eerie soundscape designed by Stefán Örn Arnarson.

But at the end of the day, the play’s the thing. PAC deserves praise for bringing this neglected classic to light.