Riding Through Grief in Theatre Burlington’s Mary’s Wedding

By: Emily R. Zarevich, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Burlington Local-News.ca

Shell shock hasn’t even touched him yet, and yet he is terrified of the explosive sound of thunder. She has never ventured far beyond her sheltered home life, and yet she extends the hand of compassion anyway. They’re a pair of young, innocent, trusting souls, he, a bud from his family’s farm fields and she, a spring flower fresh from an English finishing school. They’re made for each other. Or, at least, they were. World War I has taken him away forever, and now he only exists in her dreams. She is reliving their first meeting in a barn, their ill-fated romance, and his death at the hands of enemy soldiers every night. She is not ready to let him go.

This play’s premise is, admittedly, a sombre way to celebrate Valentine’s Day weekend, but it’s also a reminder that grief is one of the most powerful ways true love survives. A loved one can be honoured by remembering them, even when the time comes to move on. On Friday, February 13, 2026, Theatre Burlington premiered a tragic but passionate production of the wartime romance Mary’s Wedding, written by Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte and directed by Burlington local Maureen Dwyer. Poignant, intense, and surreal, it’s an uncompromising study of how bereavement and regret shape memory, and how imagination fills in the empty moments that misfortune took from us.

Brandon James Sim and Claire Sears star together as the doomed, loving couple. Sim plays Canadian-born farm boy Charlie, who is awkward, shy, sincere, and brilliant with horses. The actor dons his great-grandfather’s real wartime helmet for his soldier scenes. Claire Sears, a longtime community theatre participant, plays Mary, the beautiful and bookish daughter of a British settler family who has travelled across the waters to set up a new home. Charlie and Mary meet and fall in love on a stormy night in the countryside, and they are as star-crossed as Canadian weather is tumultuous.

Throughout the play, Mary is alive and dreaming, and Charlie is already dead. She’s getting married to someone else, but she cannot forget him. Over and over again, she experiences the trauma of losing him to a reel of past scenes where she was present, such as a magical horse ride they took together across the plains underneath the stars, and the scenes where she wasn’t present: the ones where he was at war. These, Mary pieces together out of sparse information and her own imagination.

Clad in nothing but a rumpled white nightgown and a girlish ribbon in her hair, Sears also undertakes the challenge of morphing into a secondary character in many scenes: the real-life Canadian war hero Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, who Massicotte weaves into the storyline as Charlie’s superior and mentor on the battlefield. Without so much as a quick costume change, Sears utilizes body language and vocal inflections to convince the audience that she is a world-savvy, authoritative military man willing to sacrifice himself for his country. Friendly, paternal, and approachable, the audience makes his acquaintance and witnesses his role in Canadian history. Then, in mere seconds, Sears has to transition right back into an ingénue who only touched the war through the letters Charlie sent her. Effectively, Sears plays both of Charlie’s loves: the lover he left behind and the father figure he adopted abroad.

For both Sears and Sim, the entirety of Mary’s Wedding is an impressive feat of theatre athleticism. In ninety minutes, with no intermission, no breaks, not even a sip of water, they deliver an emotionally charged, breathless script with fast-paced scene changes that require constant movement. The story’s timeline isn’t linear, as timelines in dreams never are, so they frequently have to change positions and move around props to evoke a new situation. They mimic real, vigorous horseback riding on a wooden horse assembled by set designer Michael Hannigan. The characters played by Sears have to dance, fight, die, and mourn. The character played by Sim has to labour, ride, kill, and die. The actors do all of this without a hint of fatigue.

Breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, the actors monologue the anxieties of first love and the horrors of war, into which they weave classic, schoolroom poetry, and their limited exposure of the world. Massicotte’s poetic script, which marries courtly love to historical drama, has the flavouring of a Shakespearean tragedy. The characters are given ample opportunities to rhythmically express themselves and recite their feelings and interpretations to an audience they hope will be sympathetic to their plights. Like Romeo and Juliet, their sad fate is predestined just by existing in a tragedy, but they get to tell their story first. Dreams don’t always come true, and dreams don’t last forever. Mary and Charlie have been cheated out of a happy future together, not only through misunderstandings but through global events outside of their control. Charlie’s death shatters Mary’s world and strips away her veil of youth and ignorance. And yet something holds her back from becoming an Ophelia, and giving in entirely to her heartbreak and grief. It is an inner strength that Charlie nurtured in her the night he convinced her to mount a horse with him, even though she was nervous to ride. It will take time, but she will wake up from her dreams and face the next chapter of her life without Charlie.

Performances of Mary’s Wedding will take place from February 16, 2026, to February 28, 2026. Tickets can still be purchased on Theatre Burlington’s website. After the show closes, Theatre Burlington will begin rehearsals for its next production, an adaptation of Kristen Da Silva’s Hurry Hard, a more lighthearted romance about sports rivalry. Hurry Hard is set to premiere on Friday, April 17, 2026.