“I hope it doesn’t rain,” I say to my mom as I walk out the door, umbrella in hand.
I was on my way to my first in-person theatre performance at UofT since last year’s lockdown. The play in question is Canadian playwright David French’s Salt-Water Moon, put on by The St. Michael’s College Troubadours. Having been a freshman last year, I—like many others—missed out on the chance to view an in-person performance. While I knew that the experience would not be the same as it was in the pre-pandemic days, I was nevertheless excited to be experiencing what I saw as an essential part of university life.
To comply with safety measures, the performance was set to take place outside in a quaint little park, tucked between Brennan Hall and St. Basil’s Catholic Parish. The large tree in the middle of the park was used as the main part of the “stage,” covered in fairy lights and draped in colourful sheets. The tree wonderfully transported the audience to the setting of the play: Newfoundland in the 1920s. It was hard to believe the play had ever been set to be performed indoors, but the director, Emily Villani, revealed that this had been the original plan: “Our initial idea way back [at] … the end of 2020 … [was for the play] to be an indoor show in a really intimate setting. But the pandemic, I guess, kind of allowed us to think outside the box and be a little bit more creative.”
The play involves three characters: Mary, Jacob, and the narrator. Mai-Yin Johnston plays Mary, a stargazing, young woman; Sina Sasanifard plays Jacob, Mary’s former lover; and Anna-Maria Maleshev plays the comedic yet earnest narrator. The three actors create a beautiful scene, delivering their lines in a manner that made it impossible to look away. In fact, during one of Jacob’s passionate speeches, it started raining, and, in one seamless motion, everyone in the audience pulled out their umbrellas, not daring to take their eyes off the performance for even a second. The heartfelt passion of the actors combined with the magical scenery made it easy to see why the team chose this play to start off the season—but if you weren’t there to see it, Associate Director Colin Darling sums up their reasoning perfectly: “[The play] follow[s] characters that are caught between two worlds, in a sense, [and] I feel like we’ve all been sort of caught in our past lives, in our new normal these days … as well.”
I left the performance awestruck and wondering how I could possibly put into words the way it made me feel. Everything I wanted to say felt incapable of capturing the effects of that night, so I’ll let Emily finish it off: “If there’s one thing that we learned from [the pandemic] it is that … you never know what’s going to happen in life, [so] tell the people [you love] that you love them and fight for the people that you love and … cherish the … connection that you have with everyone, whether it be a family member or a significant other. You know, just have that.”
