If your ex merely showed up to your wedding reception uninvited, you might ask them to leave. What would you do if they got drunk and started monologuing about heartbreak and made a table full of children cry?
Valley Players will present Bryna Turner’s “At the Wedding” at the Amherst Woman’s Club from Thursday, Oct. 1, to Sunday, Oct. 4, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. (The rain dates are Thursday, Oct. 8, through Sunday, Oct. 11.)
The cast includes Joanna Nix (Carlo), Kate Stango (Carly), Ali Shafi (Victor), Terrance Fables (Eli), Kimberly Salditt-Poulin (Maria), Cici Drzik (Leigh), and Blue Jordan (Eva).
“At the Wedding” is about a woman named Carlo who is heartbroken but spirited — both in the sense that she’s vivacious and that she’s had a bit too much to drink. When Carlo shows up uninvited to her ex Eva’s wedding reception — and Eva is marrying a man, no less — she reflects on the occasion and shares thoughts on relationships and heartache with other guests as the party happens without her.
Suffice it to say: she’s been better.
Joanna Nix, who plays Carlo, said the character is something of “a tragic hero. She’s been through a lot, and she is having one of those nights.”
“She’s super fun to be around, but also [has] a pure heart and soul, but kind of wears a mask behind her,” Nix said. “She hides behind her humor and her wit to shield herself from all the vulnerability and pain that she actually feels inside. She’s a lot of fun to play.”
“I can’t tell you what Carlo’s deal is. I can tell you why I love her. I think it’s really easy to look at a character like Carlo, where there’s so much volatility and energy and disruptive puckish nature, and be like, ‘So this person is a malicious force,’” said Joe Van Allen, the show’s director. “And this show is written so brilliantly that despite all of that energy, we love Carlo, and I think it’s because there’s a vulnerability we all have access to.”
“I’ve yet to meet a person in adulthood who has not had their heart broken and hasn’t wanted something of the past that they don’t have access to,” he added.
The production takes place at the Amherst Woman’s Club, a wedding venue, but the audience won’t see the wedding space itself, and that’s on purpose. Instead, the actors will perform outside the venue as lights, music and DJ announcements play inside, as if Eva’s wedding reception were actually happening behind them.
That staging ties in with “the sense that Carlo has of being the outsider,” producer and Valley Players president Matteo Pangallo said. “The audience is basically with her, relegated to the margins and just seeing glimpses of this thing going on inside that they’re not really part of, just like she is.”
In accordance with Valley Players’ tradition, half of the net ticket proceeds from the show will be donated to a local organization with ties to the play’s theme, in this case, Out Now, a Springfield-based nonprofit supporting queer youth.
“Finding an organization that was smaller was important,” Pangallo said. “We’ve contributed from our shows to large organizations, and we’ve contributed to small ones. It’s always rewarding no matter the size of the organization, but I feel like it is more impactful when what you’re giving is $1,000 or [a similar amount]. That makes a big difference to small grassroots organizations.”
Van Allen chose this show out of the more than 400 he read during the pandemic, and it stuck out in part because it hadn’t been performed in the area before. (Incidentally, though, it has a local connection: the playwright, Bryna Turner, graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2012.) He liked that it had representation of queer relationships, that it was well-paced, and that it was flexible enough not to require a complicated set.
“When you have a play that moves that kind of quickly, audiences appreciate that agility, that flow, and without it being frenetic, it pushes people forward. It’s like driving a chariot,” he said, “so I think audiences are really gonna gain some joy out of it.”
Literary aficionados will appreciate the show’s references to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which an old man forces a wedding guest to hear his tale: a storm steered his ship off course into Antarctic waters, seemingly dooming the crew to a frozen death, but they were saved when an albatross flew overhead, motivating them by its very presence as they continued to sail.
Until the Mariner shot the albatross.
Why? He doesn’t say. His shipmates made him hang it around his neck as a reminder of his crime.
Carlo, too, is an ancient mariner of sorts. She begins the show with a long monologue about heartbreak and loneliness that makes a whole table of children cry. Her albatross, one could argue, is the chance of redeeming or restarting the past.
Despite all this, the production notes in the script state bluntly: “It’s a comedy.”
“You see her grow in a good direction. [Bryna Turner] doesn’t tie everything neatly in a bow so that it’s like, ‘And now Carlo is completely healed!’” Nix said. Instead, the night is “one of those kismet nights where she’s crossing paths with so many people who are touching her in all these different ways and have different things to offer.”
“I think we get a [sense that] this is not a person who wakes up tomorrow and everything’s OK, but I think this is a person who’s taken a very wonderfully earned next step in her life,” Van Allen said.
Van Allen also sees a personal connection to Coleridge’s poem.
“‘At the Wedding’ is my ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” he said. “This is the story I need to tell.”
Tickets to “At the Wedding” are pay-what-you can, starting at $18, and are available at valleyplayers.org. Audience members should bring their own picnic blankets, chairs, and/or food and drink. The show is about 70 minutes long, with no intermission.
