Nancy Copeland: Dreaming the Great War: Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding

The question of surrogation common to historical drama – how to re-present the past – takes on a particular aspect in war drama: making the battlefield experience present for non-combatants. Several recent plays –notably R. H. Thomson’s The Lost Boys and David French’s Soldier’s Heart (both 2000) – demonstrate the centrality of narration to theatrical representations of the Great War. In “The Modernist Event,” however, Hayden White argued that “the kinds of antinarrative nonstories produced by literary modernism offer the only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of  ‘unnatural’ events . . . that mark our era, . . .” among which WWI could be included (Figural Realism, 81).  Uniquely among the cited contemporaneous plays, Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding (also 2000), employs a dramaturgy that challenges the dominance of narration.  While this dramaturgical device allows Massicotte to incorporate an unusually substantial female presence, his framing of the action as a survivor’s therapeutic dream also contributes to the play’s nostalgic romanticizing of the experience of war, an effect reinforced by the play’s climactic event, the “near mythical” cavalry charge at the Battle of Moreuil Wood.