To Harvard (the town), with love

Boston Globe

20 hours ago

Kathryn Croyle graduated from Bryn Mawr College in May 2011, and had planned to spend the summer on Nantucket with her parents and two girlfriends. But after Kathryn — who goes by Katie — got into the Stanislavsky Summer School, an acting intensive led by Moscow Art Theatre instructors in Harvard Square,
she changed her mind.
'
And
I wanted to hang out with this guy. ...'
She decided to stay at home in Harvard, sending her friends off to Nantucket with her parents. (Spoiler: both friends would end up being Katie's bridesmaids.)
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Before their Sunday wedding, the Memorial Day weekend festivities stretched from candlepin bowling at Harvard Lanes and Korean takeout from Woo Jung in Ayer on Thursday and a rehearsal dinner and s'mores welcome party on Saturday in the Croyles' backyard wetland garden (pictured). 'They've been working on it for 40 years,' says Katie.
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The guy was Stephen Hayward, her former classmate from The Bromfield School, the public school in Harvard, where they both grew up. Stephen, who goes by Steve, was living with his parents while studying comparative literature at Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, and working at the
They hadn't been friends at Bromfield, but they had shared the stage in British verse dramas; Steve had the lead while Katie — now a working actor — played the 'lowly, bar maiden,' she says. Steve doesn't recall any meaningful exchanges with Katie then, but by 2011, he found her impossible to forget: 'She was just a world-class beauty,' he says.
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The pair had begun to notice each other during college breaks, and a kinship blossomed over Beckett and Bulgakov. That summer, Katie would stop in for iced lattes and to see the 'bad boy' from high school.
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'He was a tortured poet,' she explains. 'He had
Recounting the start of the couple's romance, their friend and officiant Evan Horwitz told wedding guests: 'They did something only people in love are foolish enough to do: they sat down in the middle of the road and talked about how beautiful the moon was, that it was a 'Peter Pan' moon, and they kissed."
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They'd carpool to class in Cambridge, grabbing dinner after, before heading home. On Katie's 22nd birthday that July, Steve left her party after an argument with a friend. He was walking home, heated, when he heard her running behind him.
'Don't leave!' she cried after him. 'Why are you leaving?'
He stopped in his tracks: 'I can't actually remember how I felt [in that moment], but I'm sure I was head over heels for Katie.'
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It was after midnight, and 'my road doesn't have any streetlights,' explains Steve, 'so it's dark, pitch black.' They sat beneath what they now refer to as the 'Peter Pan moon' and had their first kiss.
The following years sent the couple to new stages and cities as Katie pursued her art. They spent four years in South Philadelphia, where she studied at the Headlong Performance Institute, before heading back north in 2016, when she got into Brown University's Trinity MFA Program.
The brief march to the reception after the ceremony featured a brass band and the couple's dog, Josie, who wore a flower crown made by Katie Henry of Rumphius Flowers. "[Josie] had one shining moment when we paraded down from the church to the General Store," says Steve.
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Steve greeted her at home with a sheet cake. Written in icing: 'Providence, here we come!'
His content marketing job was remote, meaning he could write and have joy-filled days, no matter the location. 'I've never laughed harder than with Katie,' he says. 'She says things that constantly amaze me.'
'This is my person. I couldn't live without her.'
For Katie, acting was a challenging career choice, but Steve's support kept her afloat: 'It's a hard life, you face a lot of rejection.... you have to actively choose not to be jaded. We grew up together and figured that out together.'
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The Covid-19 pandemic
As part of her "Little Women" vision for the reception, Katie had been inspired by celebratory scenes in the film, in particular a Christmas scene where the sisters make garland from dried fruit. As a nod to the source, Molly O'Rourke used tiny marzipan fruits and vegetables to serve as escort card holders and dotted the tables with colorful mushrooms, corn, and cornichons.
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In March 2020, they moved back to work at the store alongside Steve's younger brother, Danny, also a displaced actor from New York. Steve was the general manager. Katie did marketing and got inventory online so residents could order curbside pickup. As restrictions loosened, they began food service on the patio where Danny was head chef.
'We fell into a life that was very nice, but we were like, at some point, we have to go home,' says Katie.
Home, they agreed, was Brooklyn, where they returned in summer 2022 and currently reside. (The store in Harvard remains in Scott's hands.)
In 2024, Steve planned to propose on 'the first beautiful day in May' at Belvedere Castle in Central Park, which he'd read about in a Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child thriller. When Katie noticed Steve was flustered by the flood of sunbathing New Yorkers and deduced his intentions for the castle under a blazing sun, she said, 'We're not gonna do
that
there.' She redirected them
to a quiet, shaded area, where Steve proposed instead.
'I can go off a cliff,' says Steve, 'and Kate is really, really good at talking me off that cliff.'
The couple hired a DJ from Dart Collective to play in the General Store's upstairs "disco"; late night snacks and karaoke were served while an ice cream cart served scoops downstairs.
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Katie and Steve, now both 37, wed on May 25 at Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church.
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Katie had made her 'acting debut' as the Baby Jesus in the church's 1989 nativity play, and they agreed there was no better homage to their love story than their hometown.
Their close friend, Evan Horwitz, officiated their Sunday ceremony. Afterwards,
Wedding planner Molly O'Rourke of
Dinner was from Chef Danny Newberg's
The couple chose May 25, 2025, as their wedding date because "it was a palindrome." When their officiant pointed out the date was not technically a palindrome, the couple shut him down with an expletive we will not print here.
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Upon their return from their Croatia-Italy honeymoon, the newlyweds headed to a YMCA camp in New Hampshire for Katie's summer job running programming for grades 5-6. They spoke with the Globe from their cabin, where Steve works remotely for a nonprofit devoted to ending food insecurity. There are weeks of malfunctioning bugles, gaggles of campers, and their bernedoodle, Josie.
But, amidst the unpredictability, the newlyweds say they're more in love than ever.
'We talked a lot about [how] it's so weird, planning this wedding, when it feels like things are falling apart around us,' says Katie. 'We came to the conclusion that having a wedding is like betting on the future in a time when it feels really dark to do so. We have the privilege to choose joy every day and getting married felt like betting on that.'
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Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer and editor in Boston. She can be reached at