Recently, Osborn Family Producing Artistic Director Blake Robison and Associate Artistic Director Joanie Schultz sat down to discuss two of the plays they’re directing this season at the Playhouse — Mary’s Wedding, a lyrical World War I romance, and Mrs. Christie, a time-spanning investigation into Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance in 1926. In their conversation, the two directors explored how history shapes character, how emotional tension drives storytelling, and why these narratives continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

What are the plays that you're directing and what are they about?

Blake Robison: I'm directing Mary's Wedding by Stephen Massicotte, which is a lovely period romance set during the Great War, or the First World War. And it is about a Canadian farm boy who meets a young woman and falls in love and then is shipped off to the trenches of France. Thematically, the play is about the intersection of love and memory, dreams, and the process of letting go.

Joanie Schultz: I am directing Mrs. Christie, which is on two different timelines. One of them is a contemporary woman in 2026 who is going to an Agatha Christie festival. Concurrently, there's a timeline in 1926 that is pulled straight from Agatha Christie's life, which is falling apart, and she disappears for 11 days. Lucy, in the contemporary time, is trying to find out what happened to Agatha during those 11 days, and the two women find each other over space and time and jump into that second act of their lives together.

Both plays depict things that really happened. Then, there are also things that are imagined, either by the characters or by the writers themselves. How do you balance things that are based on fact with things that are imagined?

BR: I feel that the playwright has done that balancing act for us. It's baked into the play. The two main characters are imaginary, but there is one character based on an actual person who is portrayed by the actress playing Mary. The war piece of the storyline in Mary's Wedding is very rooted in historical fact. The play takes care of that for the audience, so you don't need to know a lot about World War I.

JS: And then [the playwright of Mrs. Christie] Heidi's done such great research. She went to the Agatha Christie Festival and spent so much time researching Agatha's life that there is this real component. Heidi takes a lot of license with supposing what was happening with Agatha during those 11 days. So, it is a mixture of fact and fiction that I think the playwrights of both plays really set up enough for the audience to know what's going on, to then take you on the ride with the rest.

Both plays unfold, directly or indirectly, in the shadow of WWI. How does that historical moment inform the way your characters see themselves or each other?

BR: Well, the plays are set in a specific time and social context, a certain era. Mary's Wedding spans 1918 to 1920, and we sort of live in that memory space between there. So, it informs it in the sense that the characters are a product of their era. There are certain expectations, certain social roles that a young woman was expected to play, to inhabit at that time. On the side of Charlie, it was perhaps a simpler time in terms of our understanding of good versus evil. All these young men going off to fight a war that everyone considered necessary and moral, is a clarity that we don't often get in contemporary times.

JS: Mrs. Christie definitely does bust out and time travel, trying to be a clash of times and spanning over 100 years in that way. But the setup for the play, really, is so much about Agatha Christie's actual real-life history. She met and married Archibald Christie, who was a colonel in World War I, over a period of three months — because it was the middle of the war, and he was flying off to fight. And so, a couple of things happened. One is that when they were married, they didn't really know each other very well, and two, she became a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross. There, she learned a lot about pharmaceuticals, and that became her inspiration about poisons and things. I do think that World War I was a time in which a lot of women went into working because all the men were fighting, and that created career women in a way that was not necessarily working for a lot of men when they came back. There was a real change in women's roles in between the two world wars that Agatha's really a part of.

You've both mentioned the roles of women during wartime, Agatha Christie as a nurse, and then Mary's life is directly related to this war unfolding. How do you see the plays commenting on the roles that women are allowed or forced to take during and in the aftermath of war?

JS: There's something interesting about sacrifice, which I see in Mary's Wedding. What do women sacrifice in war?

BR: Well, Mary is English, and she's just moved to Canada with her mother. And there’s something in there. We don't have a lot of detail about why, necessarily, but that alone is interesting, that they would leave England with the war on. And then, her plight, if you will, is to stay there and wait.

JS: Yeah. So many women had to wait for information.

BR: I think in Mary's Wedding, the commentary is about the emotional weight of separation. When might a reunion happen, and what would that mean? There's a longing that is pervasive throughout the play that creates an emotional tension that keeps you going. But it's shared between the two of them.

JS: Yeah, Mrs. Christie is post-war Agatha. We also meet Nancy Neele, who is a younger woman having an affair with Agatha's husband and ends up, in real life, marrying him. And so, I think we see different representations of what a woman should be and what's expected. There is a pool of traditional women's roles versus the new woman, and what that looks like differently on both.

What resonates with you about telling these stories in 2026? Are there contemporary echoes that make these stories feel urgent today?

JS: That’s an easy question for me because it takes place in 2026 along with taking place in 1926. I think that partially has a lot to do with Heidi's resonance with Agatha Christie. You know, both women [in Mrs. Christie] are in a moment of grief and change, and wondering if, at 37, they can restart and where they still have to go from here. I mean, Agatha wasn't even famous yet. Her career had just begun as the great Agatha Christie that we know now; most of her books were written after then. Just knowing that and also seeing the inspiration of this contemporary character finding solace and inspiration in this literary, artistic, singular, unique woman who is our ancestor in our female lineage. I think that’s resonant right now.

BR: I was thinking of Mrs. Christie just over the last day or so with the passing of Tom Stoppard. Because so many of his plays have a similar structure, where you have contemporary people playing detective, trying to figure out what happened at this place 100 years ago, or who were my ancestors, and how are they affecting my life now? Plays like Arcadia and Leopoldstadt. And, you know, Mrs. Christie has the same structure.

JS: It does, it does. We've actually talked about Arcadia a handful of times in our design meetings.

BR: Mary's Wedding doesn't do that in the same way, but I believe that there's great value in telling period stories. And I think audiences are smart enough to draw the connections for themselves. We don't have to hit people over the head for them to understand that young people in love at a time of political turmoil and world tumult has something to do with what happens and continues to happen in the world today.