Vows: A Life Frequently Apart, but an Enterprise They’ll Boldly Take On

Mary Wiseman never worried that the parents of her boyfriend, Noah Averbach-Katz, wouldn’t like her.

When the couple started dating in 2013, she already knew them pretty well — she and Mr. Averbach-Katz were acting students at Juilliard, the Manhattan performing arts college. His parents, Rachelle Averbach and Steve Katz, frequently flew to New York from their home in California to see their son in school shows. They were always friendly and encouraging.

“Noah’s parents were like fixtures in our class,” said Ms. Wiseman, 33. “They’re enthusiastic, supportive people. They would even get our drama group little gifts and things.”

It wasn’t until 2017, though, that she knew unequivocally she had also become his parents’ favorite classmate. This was the year the flame-haired Ms. Wiseman landed the role of Ensign Sylvia Tilly in the CBS TV series “Star Trek: Discovery.”

“My mom is a huge Trekkie,” said Mr. Averbach-Katz, 30, who lives with Ms. Wiseman in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “When Mary got the job, we FaceTimed her with the news. She wept.”

Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Averbach-Katz met in 2011, when both entered Juilliard as graduate students in a 17-member drama group. They didn’t start dating until their third year.

“And we weren’t even that good of friends before that, because school takes up so much time,” said Ms. Wiseman, who grew up in Milford, Pa., and Gaithersburg, Md., with three older brothers and her parents, Dorothy and Kevin Wiseman.

A first hint of attraction came during their second year, when they were cast opposite each other in a scene of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” in a scene-study class. Ms. Wiseman played Masha, who has an affair with Vershinin, the soldier, played by Mr. Averbach-Katz.

“In that scene he says, ‘I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love,’” Ms. Wiseman said. “Normally our teacher would do a scene like that over and over again. It was very rare to only do a scene once. But she was like, ‘Oh, wow — that shouldn’t have worked but it worked.’”

Not long after, their onstage chemistry spilled into a production of “Our Town.” Soon they were ducking into private spaces around campus to kiss.

“We tried to be sneaky about it, because you’re in this small group, and there’s a delicate group dynamic: When people start dating, everyone has to adjust,” Ms. Wiseman said. “So we’d run down the hall and find a spot and make out really fast and then pretend it wasn’t happening, even though Noah would have lipstick all over his face.”

By their fourth year, “we were a big-time, hard-core couple, and everyone knew it,” Mr. Averbach-Katz said. But then, in 2015, came graduation, and with it a host of challenges to keeping up their romance.

Mr. Averbach-Katz, lanky and sad-eyed, found his first roles as a professional actor in regional theater, in cities like Washington and Portland, Me., and shows including “My Name is Asher Lev.” Ms. Wiseman, meanwhile, stayed in New York, landing a role in her classmate Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Obie-winning, Off Broadway play, “An Octoroon.”

When both were in New York, “basically we were just living at each other’s apartments,” Mr. Averbach-Katz said. (His was in Harlem, hers in Brooklyn.) “We’d buy food for one place, then go to the other place, and all the food we bought for the first place would spoil.”

Separations for work, though, seemed necessary. “We’ve always had this implicit understanding that, because we’re both actors, when an opportunity comes up we have to say yes, even if it separates us for a long time,” Ms. Wiseman said.

Mr. Averbach-Katz continued acting in shows like “The Lion in Winter” at Two River Theater in New Jersey in 2016. Ms. Wiseman started veering in an on-camera direction, securing a recurring part as Trinity in the Zach Galifianakis show “Baskets.” Then the “Star Trek” audition came along. She’s not sure she would have gotten the part without Mr. Averbach-Katz’s input. “I had sort of grown up on ‘Star Trek,’” Mr. Averbach-Katz said, in what may be an understatement.

“As a kid I would go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions with my mom, and there’s some extremely embarrassing pictures of me as a 13-year-old, at the height of my sex appeal, in ‘Star Trek’ gear,” Mr. Averbach-Katz said. He was an only child who grew up in Fairfax, Calif., amid “Star Trek” Christmas ornaments, saltshakers and action figures. Steven Katz, the publisher of Mother Jones, is less a Trekkie than his wife, Rachelle Averbach, a psychotherapist. She started watching the sci-fi phenomenon after the original series debuted in 1966. She later integrated the show into her life in an unexpected way, using it to teach her son life lessons.

“There are these wonderful moments in ‘Star Trek’ about equality and the environment and racism and sexism,” Ms. Averbach said. “Noah and I would watch the show and we’d talk about it.” When Mr. Averbach-Katz expressed reservations about being bar mitzvahed, for example, she cued an episode of “Star Trek: Next Generation” in which the character Alexander wasn’t sure he wanted to become a Klingon. “It was a rite of passage for Alexander, and it became this fun parallel for our own cultural dilemma. That’s’ sort of how ‘Star Trek’ became an important philosophical point of discussion in our family.”

It is also how its aesthetic eventually became an important piece of Ms. Wiseman’s audition video. Mr. Averbach-Katz helped her read for the part.

“He told me, ‘You have to nail the techno babble,’” Ms. Wiseman said. When she went to send her photo to the show’s producers, Mr. Averbach-Katz, who never comments on Ms. Wiseman’s wardrobe, told her to change. “I was wearing this crazy hippie peasant dress with holes in it,” she said. “Noah was like, ‘Mary, you have to wear something more structured.’”

Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Averbach-Katz moved into their Prospect Heights apartment just after she signed contracts to became Ensign Tilley. Both were starting to think marriage was in their future. And both were ready to put lessons they had learned about long-distance love to use as Ms. Wiseman prepared to commit to nine months a year shooting “Star Trek” in Toronto.

“It was a watershed moment in my life. It was everything I’d hoped for, like I’d won the lottery,” she said of the part. When she told her parents, “I saw my dad’s shoulders relax in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen in my life. He actually cut a different silhouette.”

They were as relieved as she was at the idea of a steady paycheck, and the financial security that came with it.

“But in other ways I was really sad at having to be apart from Noah,” Ms. Wiseman said. Mr. Averbach-Katz’s regional theater work had prepared them for separation in smaller doses. And they were armed with advice from theater veterans: “There’s a general rule of thumb that older actors have told me, which is that you should really aim to see each other every two weeks. You can push it to three, but after that it gets really hard.” They put that rule into practice as Ms. Wiseman left for her first season, in March 2017. Still, “the experience of missing Noah was like someone had taken an orca out of me. It just felt like, I need this person.”

Mr. Averbach-Katz felt the same. But he sensed that Ms. Wiseman’s role in “Star Trek” opened a new chapter for them as a couple. “When Mary got the job I was like, hell yeah, I’m going to propose,” he said. He already had a ring in mind. On a Thanksgiving trip home to California in 2017, while Ms. Wiseman was deep into her first season, he asked his mother if she still had his Grandma Sweetheart’s Edwardian diamond ring. She did.

The ring, a diamond surrounded by platinum filigree, dates to between 1890 and 1910. “It was given to my mother by her mother during the Depression, at a time when people didn’t have things. So it became this symbol of hope and better times,” Ms. Averbach said. “I was happy Noah wanted it for Mary.”

A month later, over Christmas at the Wisemans’ house in Silver Spring, Md., Mr. Averbach-Katz asked Kevin and Dorothy Wiseman for their blessing to propose. Once he got it, he asked for advice about timing. “They told me I should do it in April, before she left to go back to Toronto,” Mr. Averbach-Katz said. April 1, 2018, has since become legendary in both families.

That morning, Mr. Averbach-Katz orchestrated a scavenger hunt that led Ms. Wiseman from their apartment in Brooklyn to his old apartment in Harlem, then on to Malachy’s Donegal Inn, the bar in Manhattan where they first exchanged “I love yous,” then to Juilliard and finally to two favorite local cafes. At each stop, Ms. Wiseman was ambushed by loved ones. Her brothers flew in from multiple cities to surprise her at Juilliard; Ms. Averbach and Mr. Katz secretly awaited her arrival at the first cafe, Cheryl’s Global Soul; her parents were camped out at the final cafe, Lincoln Station. By the time the scavenger hunt instructions told her to go home, more than a dozen friends and family members had congregated at the apartment. Mr. Averbach-Katz dropped to one knee, presented his grandmother’s ring, and asked if she would marry him. Ms. Wiseman, overwhelmed by her day of surprises and in tears, said yes.

Since then, Mr. Averbach-Katz has been immersed in a copy of “Wedding Planning for Dummies.” “Mary didn’t wrap in Toronto until the holidays, so I’ve done a lot of the wedding planning,” he said. “I had a lot to learn.”

Their Feb. 16 wedding at the Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, N.Y., betrayed no signs of amateurism. A crowd of 160, including several of Ms. Wiseman’s “Star Trek” castmates, was kept cozy in a barn outfitted with hanging globe lanterns and a huppah. Ms. Wiseman, in a silk ivory wrap dress by the Spanish designer Cortana and with her long hair flowing, walked down an aisle with both parents; her eight-member bridal party included her three brothers and just one woman, her cousin Delia Regan. Mr. Averbach-Katz, in a black satin J.Crew tuxedo, was flanked by eight friends, three from New York and five from California.

Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church, officiated. After calling on Boo Killebrew, an actor friend of the couple’s, to read the Masha-Vershinin scene from “Our Town,” he reflected on the nature of love.

“Love is a forest that finds you,” he said. “Love turns you into the truest version of you.”

Then Mr. Averbach-Katz, reading from handwritten vows, told Ms. Wiseman, “Before you, so much of myself was a mystery. You reached me. You unlocked me. You showed me how to be myself.” When it was her turn, Ms. Wiseman, dabbing tears, said, “I promise when we’re apart I’ll still be tethered to you. Your name is written on my heart.”

After two blessings from Mr. Averbach-Katz’s cousin, Rabbi Gary Katz, Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins pronounced them married. The room erupted in cheers, though Vulcan salutes may have been appropriate.