“Sea Marks”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - July 2010

You know you are getting old when your youth starts being referred to as “another time.” My youth, you must understand, was divided between New York City and a tiny town in northwestern Connecticut. In NYC, of course, everyone had phones and TVs. In Connecticut, I knew lots of people without either in their home. Some of them didn’t have electricity or running water either. But even in New York I remember a scissors-and-rags man who did business from a horse-drawn cart. Compared to today, the 1960’s were another time.

It was already “another time” a decade later when Gardner McKay (1932-2001) wrote Sea Marks – a sweet little two-character play being given a charming production in the Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company. Colm Primrose (Walton Wilson) is a 52-year old fisherman who lives on Clifford Heads, a fictional island in the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland, and Timothea Stiles (Kristin Wold), a Welsh woman only a few years younger, lives in cosmopolitan Liverpool and works in a publishing house. The Beatles have already made it big but she STILL doesn’t have a telephone in her flat.

Colm spots Timothea at when she comes to the Heads for the wedding of a distant cousin, and later bravely writes her a letter. Their relationship remains epistolary for about 18 months, until the wedding of another distant island cousin provides the excuse for her to make the long journey (boat, train, bus, and boat again) to meet her pen-pal face to face. They quickly arrange for him to come and visit her in Liverpool – to stay in her one-bedroom flat.

These two lonely, intelligent middle-aged people fall deeply in love. It is obvious that they are soul-mates, but that they thrive in very different environments. Timothea, who grew up on a farm in Wales, has no desire to return to that hard-scrabble way of life. Colm knows no other life than the sea. Once they are together in Liverpool the rest of the play concerns itself with their struggle to reconcile their individual needs.

As Colm, Wilson is a large, plain-looking man. He is guileless – what you see is what you get. Wold makes Timothea a petite and charming lady. Both characters are genuinely good souls and it is a pleasure to spend time in their company.

McKay is best remembered as as an actor, playing Capt. Adam Troy on the 1959-62 ABC series Adventures in Paradise, but his great interests were writing and travel. You can hear both those passions clearly expressed and his experiences with them well utilized in this play. It has a rich Celtic tone, and the descriptions of Colm’s island home and way of life were obviously based on first-hand observations during travels around the United Kingdom

Under Daniela Varon’s direction Sea Marks is a thoroughly romantic play. I noticed many middle-aged and older couples in the audience holding hands or resting their heads on their partners’ shoulders during the performance. This is a perfect play to present in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre because Bernstein herself found great joy in a late-in-life second marriage. Love and sex are not just for the young!

I liked how McKay didn’t go for the obvious with his plot or characters. On the couple of occasions I thought “Oh, I know where this is going” I was wrong. And that was nice. There are no deep dark secrets here, just two people who desperately want to be together and can’t quite manage it.

While the language is often poetic, the play is realistic, which is why one glaringly impossible aspect bothered me no end. Along the way Timothea has excerpts from Colm’s letters to her published as poems in a volume called Sea Sonnets. The letters, large chunks of which we hear during the early scenes, are clearly written in prose – to turn them into any kind of poetry would require considerable editing, and a sonnet is a very specific form of poetry. In addition, you cannot publish, let along edit, the work of a living author without his or her permission. But the book provides McKay with a way to thrust Colm out into urban society, a place he doesn’t loath, but in which he is never really comfortable.

Colm rankles when Timothea’s publisher boss refers to him as a “primitive.” This is not George of the Jungle or even Tarzan. Colm is an intelligent, creative man who prefers a simple way of life, and McKay, Varon, and Wilson are careful to honor his dignity.

I did question whether a single woman, even a divorcee like Timothea, could really have moved a strange man into her apartment so easily back in the 1960’s. Even in a big city eyebrows would have been raised. I don’t think it would not have been uncommon for the landlord, family members, or even her employer to have raised the issue of community morals. But this is a romance, and Timothea and Colm’s troubles are personal, not communal.

Kiki Smith has designed delightful little sets that are flexible enough to represent the several settings in which the scenes take place. I especially liked the little miniature representations of Colm’s whaite-washed, thatch-roofed cottage and the brick townhouse in which Timothea has her flat which hung high upstage on the left and the right to clearly mark each character’s territory. Smith’s costumes mirror those little buildings, turning Wilson and Wold into exactly the sorts of people who would live in houses like that.

Varon and Sound Designer Michael Pfeiffer have selected an interesting mix of traditional Irish music and Beatles’ songs that play during the rather interminable set changes. There was an awful lot of scurrying around in the dark by black-clad stage hands, mostly handling props and furniture as the set pieces rotated and rolled easily.

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon of late. When an instrumental version of a familiar tune is played, people start singing, very quietly but loudly enough that the words seem to float in the air just over the right notes of the melody. This was very apparent on several of the Beatles’ tunes – I even caught myself doing it, but not until the show was over and warbled a bit as I walked out – but I have noticed it happening during the overture of musicals as well. I wonder if, now that we are all so used to having our music delivered directly into our brains through ear-buds, we have forgotten that other people can hear us if we sing along?

Sea Marks is not a play or a production that is likely to generate great excitement, but it deserves an audience, if for nothing else than the warmth and spirit of Wold and Wilson’s performances. There is no rough language or violence, but this is a play about grown-up people in an intimate relationship. Young people will be predictably grossed-out by the idea of two people over the age of 25 making love, and also probably puzzled by the glacial pace with which Colm and Timothea’s relationship develops sans cell phones, tweets and Facebook. Make this a theatre date for the parents.

Click HERE to see the full production photo gallery.

Sea Marks runs through in the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre on Shakespeare & Company’s Kemble Street campus in Lenox, MA with curtain times at 3:00pm or 8:00pm. The show runs two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission. A wide range of ticket prices from $12 to $48 are available, along with the Company’s many discounts including special Student, Senior, Military, Teacher, Rush, and Group rates. The popular Full-time Berkshire Resident 40% discount also applies. Check out the website for specific show dates, further information, to book your tickets, your group, party or rental and to learn about taking advantage of our cornucopia of special savings! Visit: www.shakespeare.org or call the Box Office at (413) 637-3353.

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