Of bows and beaus

The Waltz
Watermark Theatre, North Rustico
October 15, 2025

The Watermark Theatre’s been lucky in love this year. First their flawless postal courtship gem Dear Jack, Dear Louise outshone everything else on PEI stages this summer; and now a second romantic comedy, Watermark’s charming production of Marie Beath Badian’s The Waltz, is lighting up the offseason. 

A popular Filipino-Canadian playwright, Badian is best known for The Prairie Trilogy, a multi-generational triptych of plays spanning fifty years set in rural Saskatchewan. The trilogy began with 2013 play Prairie Nurse, a comedy of culture clashes and romantic misunderstandings set in 1967, featuring Filipino immigrant nurses Puring and Penny working at a smalltown Saskatchewan hospital. The Waltz, the second play in the trilogy, premiered in 2022; it takes place in 1993 when Penny’s son meets Puring’s daughter. The trilogy’s third play, The Cottage Guest, is still in development. 

While themes, geography and family lineages connect these plays, they function as self-contained stories. You don’t need to see Prairie Nurse to understand or enjoy The Waltz, though there are Easter eggs and references in the latter that have extra meaning if you know the earlier play. At its core, The Waltz is a simple boy-meets-girl story, albeit in the very specific cultural and geographical context of two 1990s Filipino-Canadian teens connecting at a prairie cabin. Badian herself has called the play “my coming-of-age-love letter to the Saskatchewan Sky [and] growing up second gen in the 90s.”

Goofily cheerful Romeo “RJ” Alvarez Jr. has graduated as valedictorian and is driving from Ontario to British Columbia to attend university when he stops in Saskatchewan to look up some of his mother’s old friends. One of those friends is out, but his cabin is occupied by a guest, an angrier, angstier teen named Beatrice “Bea” Klassen. How angry? Well, she repeatedly menaces RJ with a crossbow, none too impressed to find an unexpected stranger on her rustic doorstep at dusk. Hijinks ensue. 

I’ll pause here to note how many romance-adjacent components are winkingly layered into this setup: the script has fun at RJ’s expense regarding the connotations of his first name, but both teens have names in common with Shakespearean lovers (from Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing); and prairie spitfire Bea may not be a conventional Cupid, but she still spends much of The Waltz threatening to pierce RJ’s heart with an arrow. 

Iconography aside, the meat of this tale is a meet-cute, albeit one that starts off rockier than most; the cynical, sharp-tongued Bea is not the friendliest host, but the kids gradually find common ground as they talk, laugh, drink and dance, sharing stories and losing themselves in a vast, velvety Saskatchewan night. 

Badian’s smart, funny script is a sweet blend of romance, comedy and 90s nostalgia with two sharply drawn, likeable and distinctive characters. Anthony Perpuse and Kryslyne-Mai Ancheta have good chemistry as RJ and Bea, believably and winningly embodying both characters. Ancheta’s expressions and reactions are big enough at times to border on seeming affected, but Bea is a performatively melodramatic teenager and Ancheta’s vibe feels more organic as Bea relaxes, so I may just be overthinking this. 

Regardless, the actors, director Santiago Guzmán, set/costume designer Brenda Duran, lighting designer James Clement, sound designer Pat Caron and stage manager Anne Putnam all do fine work here in bringing to life these characters, their clothes, their music, their era, Bea’s cabin and even a little slice of the Saskatchewan sky via projections suspended over Duran’s coherently structured, invitingly detailed set. 

“Love at first sight is total fiction,” says RJ at one point; but in its best moments, Watermark’s polished production of Badian’s heartfelt script is an eloquently persuasive rebuttal of that jaded sentiment.