Marion Bridge

This two-act play set in Sydney—perhaps MacIvor’s most conventional work—involves a trio of sisters trying to cope with their mother’s illness and subsequent death, as well as reckoning with a family history that has pushed the three women their separate ways.

The first act develops from the return home from Toronto of Agnes MacKeigan, who resists getting emotionally caught up in her mother’s imminent death because of her residual resentment at having had to give up her daughter. An alcoholic whose veneer of urban sophistication thinly veils a failing acting career and a history of escaping from responsibility, Agnes butts heads with her sister “Saint” Theresa, who picks up the slack from her wayward sister and whose sense of martyrdom further fuels Agnes’s anger: “You don’t have to make every goddamn thing you do the way of the cross.” Theresa sees Agnes as dissolute, selfish, and irresponsible, and Agnes in turn views Theresa as bossy and self-righteously self-denying. Where Theresa has taken this pose to its logical extension, becoming a nun and moving to a farm in rural New Brunswick, the youngest sister, the tactiturn Louise, has beat a numbed retreat to the television, where she buffers herself from her family’s melodrama by escaping into the proxy fantasy lives of talk shows and soap operas.

Tension mounts between the sisters as Agnes abdicates from watching over her sick mother in order to visit, under cover of anonymity, her now-teenage daughter. MacIvor establishes, through the bitter but often humorous banter between the three that the sisters are, in various ways, at sea in their lives—Louise is effectively a shut-in, resentful at always having been sheltered and excluded as the baby of the family; Agnes, whose acting career “is turning out to be a very expensive, time consuming and demoralizing hobby,” is haunted by the past; and Theresa is in retreat from a world in which the God to which she has pledged herself seems ever more elusive. The act finishes with the three returning from an infuriating visit, orchestrated by their mother, to their senile father, whose patriarchal authority is implicitly at the root of the family’s problems, only to find out that in their absence she has passed away.

The second act involves a reconstitution of sorts, as the three women progressively band together and find ways out of their emotional binds, which MacIvor articulates through occasional soliloquies that break the naturalistic rhythm of the play. As they come to grips with the idea that their mother has been reasonably happy to go on her way, with each other’s help they gradually move to amend their dissatisfying lives. As Theresa observes, “when you get to the end of the road you can either turn around and go back the way you came—or you can make a new path,” and with each other’s help, the three sisters choose the latter course. Agnes increasingly intervenes, still anonymously, in her daughter Joanie’s life, despite Theresa’s disapproval of such meddling, and discovers that Joanie is (presumably) in much the same predicament as she had been: at odds with her mother, in an unfulfilling relationship, and, in need of a place to stay after being turfed out her home. Just as Agnes starts to get cold feet about reuniting with her daughter and considers retreating to Toronto, however, Theresa discovers that the girl is pregnant and invites Joanie to come and stay with them. Louise—whom Agnes has diagnosed as a frustrated, closet-bound lesbian and has encouraged to “do what you need to do”—caps this sense of revival by coming home with a truck that she has bought from her friend Dory, reflective of an increased sense of confidence, mobility, and acceptance of her mother’s death. The act ends with the trio’s journey to Marion Bridge, destination of an earlier, much-anticipated but bitterly disappointing family outing, where they celebrate their mother’s life by tossing post-it notes containing her telegraphic death-bed messages into the air.

Rich in characterization, warm and funny, Marion Bridge was nominated for the 1999 Governor-General’s Award and was made into a feature film in 2002. Written by MacIvor and directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld, the movie starred Molly Parker as Agnes, Rebecca Jenkins as Theresa, and Stacy Smith as Louise.