Civil War Plays 2013

Now that we're more than halfway through the sesquicentennial period, how's it look out there for Civil War plays being produced around the country?

I wrote recently about the Tri-State-and-Federal-District Civil War Project that promises a bunch of new work about the war and its legacy, much of which looks as if it might turn out to be interesting.  None of it exists yet, though.  Also upcoming at some point:  Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Prizewinner for A Soldier's Play, says in his bio for his new play that "he is currently working on a quartet of plays called We about the Civil War and Reconstruction."  Glad to hear it.

Don Bender is terrific as Lee
in The Killer Angels.

At the moment, here in Chicago, there's a strong production by the always swell Lifeline Theatre, an adaptation by Karen Tarjan of the Michael Shaara novel The Killer Angels, about the battle of Gettysburg.  The source material is a little too Confederate-apologist for me--more about that in a minute--but the adaptation is quite good. The show is extended through November 24.

Shaara tells the reader at the outset of his book, “This is the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, told from the viewpoints of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and some of the other men who fought there,” so it is no surprise that its perspective is more Southern than not.  Well and good, except that it retails the tired falsehood that Lee opposed slavery.  This is an important falsehood to retail if you wish to convey (a) the sainthood of Robert E. Lee; (b) the idea that secession was not about slavery; and by extension, (c) the moral legitimacy of the Confederacy.  But some of the slave quarters at Lee's home at Arlington are still there to be visited today, the letter to his wife still exists in which he describes slavery as a burden to whites but a divinely ordained boon to the black race, and the 1866 testimony of Lee's former slave Wesley Norris of being whipped under Lee's personal supervision is still harrowing to read.  What Lee actually opposed was secession, but of course there's no smooth way to get that fact to support the idea that the Confederacy was a noble thing.

The book also puts forth as the Southern view on slavery--unfortunately, it's the only Southern view on slavery that makes it into the Lifeline adaptation, as far as I recall--the poppycock that a victorious Confederacy would soon end slavery, or let it die out, or something.  

Slavocracy's operating manual

In fact, Article I (Section 9, Clause 4) of the Confederate Constitution prohibited the Confederate Congress or any individual Confederate State from ever passing a law against slavery.  Again, to make the Confederacy into a thing worth honoring, its apologists must divorce it from slavery in the modern popular mind.  So it's incumbent upon sensible people to remember that secession was not merely about preserving slavery, it was explicitly about extending slavery.  The whole ten-year crisis of the 1850s was about Southern attempts to extend slavery into federal territories.  And not just westward toward the Pacific; there were influential voices urging military annexation of Mexico, Central America and parts of South America, along with all the major Caribbean islands, so that these places could become slave states.  Of course, a victorious Confederacy would have been too exhausted in the mid-1860s to launch the new war that might make any of that happen.  Still, some Lost Cause types in 1904 published this map of what their dream country would have looked like.

Fun fact to know and tell:  the Sun-Times review of Lifeline's show gets the battle's dates wrong; also, the critic's summary of why the battle matters ("not only resulted in the largest number of casualties of the war, but also is widely seen as its turning point") is suspiciously close to Wikipedia's  summary of the same thing ("involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war's turning point").  As the economist Brad DeLong often asks, "Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?"

Back on topic now:  There are two different musicals called The Civil War making the rounds.  One I've written briefly about before, as has celebrity commentor Tom Shea, who corrected me when I thought it was a new show.  Composed by Frank Wildhorn with lyrics by Gregory Boyd, Jack Murphy, and Wildhorn, it was a major Broadway flop in the '90s but seems to have found new life during the sesquicentennial.  In the last twelve months it's had productions at the Lubbock, Texas Civic Center Theatre (which for some unfathomable reason is not yet named after Buddy Holly), the Gettysburg Community Theatre, Hale Center Theater in Utah, and the Artisan Center Theater in Texas, among others, with upcoming productions scheduled later this year or in 2014 at Poteet Theatre in Oklahoma City, Eagle Theatre in Hammonton, New Jersey, and a return to Lubbock, this time at Sidecar Theatre.

Theatreworks USA's The Civil War

The other one is a new show produced this summer at Theatreworks USA at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village.  Put together by Arthur Perlman and Jeff Lunden, best known respectively for the book/lyrics and score of their musical adaptation of Arthur Kopit's play Wings, it features mostly period songs like "Lincoln and Liberty" and "Dixie" as it presents an hour-long dramatization of the war aimed at grades three through nine.  The show focuses on a collection of archetypal characters whose stories interweave through the songs.  It ran all summer as Theatreworks's free summer show, and the Theatreworks website says they're putting together a national tour. 

Assuming the website's study guide material accurately reflects the show, I have a complaint.  Here's the description of two of the characters: Zak, a runaway slave who demands the right to fight his own fight; Will, his former best friend and "master."  Sigh.  No way Will was ever really Zak's best friend.  His self-interest as Zak's "master" would always preclude genuinely caring about Zak's diametrically opposed self-interest.  And why is master in quotation marks?  If we're denying that the master-slave relationship was a real thing, we're not teaching the core fact in this whole saga. Let us hope that the show itself is truer than the show's study guide.  The chief value of teaching the American Iliad to schoolchildren is to convey an understanding of the great struggle that continues to shape our identity as a nation.  If our understanding of that struggle is that it was a big misunderstanding among perfectly nice people who actually all liked each other--if we deny or smooth over the moral aspects of the war, of slavery and of secession--we're just feeding kids pablum.

Cornerstone Arts Alliance in Goshen, New York, produced this April a pair of obscure one-acts from the war's centennial period, Edward Finnegan's 1964 drama My Hands Is Full o' Gifts and Charles George's 1960 The Curtain Falls.  In the first, the spirit of a Civil War soldier observes a modern-day debate over whether to move the cemetery he's buried in to make room for a building development.  In the second, Edwin Booth in 1873 sifts through his brother's trunk and remembers.  So, both about legacy.  Nice.

Winding Road's cast for Row after Row

Also in April, Winding Road Theatre Ensemble in Tucson produced the world premiere of Row after Row by Jessica Dickey, about a trio of Civil War re-enactors, one of them female, who in a time shift to 1863 also portray the Civil War characters being re-enacted.  The play is already scheduled for its New York premiere in January in a production by The Women's Project at Center Stage II.

Finally for now, Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man, the Incredible Hulk of new Civil War plays, continues to rampage around the country.  Lopez's website, which appears to need updating, lists an even dozen productions in just the first four months of 2013.  A quick look around the internet locates other productions during that period or since then in Rochester NY, Austin TX, Dorset VT, Columbus OH, Seattle WA, and Jacksonville Beach FL.  There are undoubtedly more.

All of a sudden, a widely produced Civil War play

I've made sporadic attempts to track what Civil War plays are being done elsewhere in Chicago and around the country, mostly in the hope that there would be a lot to report.  The big development currently is that there is now what didn't used to exist:  a widely produced new play about the Civil War. 

It's The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez, which I wrote about back in October.  Three actors, one set.  Here's the playwright's synopsis, from his website:

It is Passover, 1865.  The Civil War has just ended and the annual celebration of freedom from bondage is being observed in Jewish homes across the country.  One of these homes, belonging to the DeLeons of Virginia, sits in ruins.  Confederate officer Caleb DeLeon has returned from the war to find his family missing and only two former slaves remaining.  Caleb is badly wounded and the two men, Simon and John, are forced to care for him.

Matthew Lopez, looking about 18, with the Old Globe cast

It made its world premiere at Luna Stage in
 Montclair, New Jersey (where my friend Jim Glossman works a lot, though I don't believe he was involved in this show), way back in 2006.  The website lists thirteen productions since then, omitting at least the Plowshares Theatre Company production that ran in Detroit for two weeks in January and the Curtain Call Theatre production which ran in Latham, New York, during April and May.  The play's fifth listed production was a highly acclaimed one at the Manhattan Theatre Club in February and March 2011, which gave the play a national reputation just as the Sesquicentennial period was beginning and artistic directors across the country started wondering if maybe there was a good three-actor, one-set Civil War play out there somewhere.

There are another thirteen productions listed as scheduled, including at Northlight Theatre in Skokie (or, as people outside the area persist in spelling it, "Chicago").  By this time next year, the play will have been produced at least twenty-eight times, in twenty states plus the District of Columbia and Canada.  Nice job, Matthew Lopez.

Civil War plays for 2012

Our own Opus 1861: the Civil War in Symphony, a world premiere music theatre piece we're building from about 20 Civil War songs, goes up in April.  There are other Civil War shows going up around the country next year as well--I haven't done an actual count, but it seems like there will be more in 2012 than there were in 2011.

The Washington Stage Guild in downtown Washington DC is producing the world premiere of Amelia:  a Story of Abiding Love by Alex Webb from January 5-29.  It's a two-person show starring the playwright and his wife about a woman trying to free her husband from the Andersonville Confederate prison camp.  It's inspired by one sentence in a journal kept by someone at Andersonville:  "Rumor has it that a woman has come in here after her man."

Half a mile away, Ford's Theatre, itself of course a piece of Civil War history, stages the world premiere of Necessary Sacrifices by Richard Hellesen from January 20 through February 12.  Hellesen has written three other Civil War plays for Ford's; this one is about the relationship between President Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  You would expect the people at Ford's, which besides being a working theatre is a national museum dedicated to Lincoln's legacy, to have its facts straight, but here's how they describe the play in their season guide:

Richard Hellesen’s new play Necessary Sacrifices imagines the
real-life meetings between abolitionist Frederick Douglass and
President Abraham Lincoln. In the midst of the Civil War, the
president responds to Douglass’s passionate arguments for allowing
African Americans the opportunity to be represented in the Union
Army, thereby fighting for their own freedom.

The problem with this is that Douglass visited Lincoln at the White House for the first time in the summer of 1863, whereas the federal government had begun recruiting African American enlistments in 1862.  By the time they met, Douglass was already the most prominent recruiter of black soldiers for the Union army, and both his sons had enlisted.  So had thousands of other African American men, so many that in May '63 the government had set up the Bureau of Colored Troops to handle the high volume of enlistments.  They met to discuss the unequal treatment of black soldiers which had caused black enlistment to slow down; once Lincoln heard Douglass's bill of particulars, he agreed with him and took steps to remedy matters.

So what gives?  Let's hope that the mistake in Ford's season guide is simply that, a mistake in the season guide.  But I fear that it might accurately reflect the play itself, which would indicate that Ford's has bought into the currently fashionable opinion that Lincoln had to be convinced of the morality of things like emancipation and civil rights.  Lincoln's well-known slowness to adopt emancipation and related issues like black enlistment as his administration's policies was essentially political, in the best sense of the word--to lose support for the war in the tentatively still loyal slave-holding border states would be to lose the war, which would doom any federal effort to do anything at all about slavery in what would then be a foreign country.  It can be argued, though I think not successfully, that his caution was bad political strategy.  But there is nothing in the historical record to support the idea that Lincoln disagreed with the moral rightness of what people like Douglass and Charles Sumner were urging him to do faster.

But I digress.  Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has a really interesting show coming up for a short run in April (the 13th through the 15th only, the same weekend we preview Opus 1861).  It's a community-based play called A Resting Place, about the lives of area residents during the Civil War.  The playwright is Alison Carey.  Here's a plot summary: "A loving mother decides to break ground for a memorial to the long-dead of our nation’s bloodiest conflict. But when she digs up more than she expects, Bethlehem present comes face to face with Bethlehem past."  Assuming it doesn't involve zombies, this sounds great to me.

By the way, the Touchstone website says this: "Produced in conjunction with Moravian College, Touchstone concludes the Historic Bethlehem Partnership’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War . . ."  Really, Historic Bethlehem Partnership?   You're concluding your commemoration in 2012, three years before the anniversary period ends?  C'mon guys, step up to the plate.

Finally, for now, the Masquerade Theatre in Houston, which does musicals, is putting together a show they're calling simply The Civil War.   Period songs, diary entries and so on, plus text from Lincoln, Douglass, and Whitman.  It runs May 18-27, and the Masquerade website says it'll be both "gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring."  My goodness.

Guts and awe aside, one cool thing about the graphic Masquerade is using for the show is that the tattered flag it shows is apparently a photo of the actual flag that flew over Fort Sumter.  Nice touch.

Civil War plays elsewhere, not in Chicago

It's old news by now--but still shameful-- that there is no federal Civil War Sesquicentennial organizing committee (though the admirable National Park Service has events planned at the Civil War battlefields it administers), and if online journalist Robert McNamara's round-up is up to date, only twenty-five states (plus D. C.) have official commemorations planned (five of the eleven states from the old Confederacy, twenty of the twenty-five loyal states).  Nothing west of Iowa and Missouri, though the states of Kansas, California and Oregon, as well as the territories of Colorado, Dakota (not yet itself divided into North and South), Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, all contributed soldiers to the Union army.

So it will be interesting to see how widespread the production of Civil War plays will be during the next four years.  Outside of Chicago, there is somewhat of a natural accumulation of them in places that were in the war's geography, but let's hope that by 2015 the country's theatres will have outshone the embarrassingly absent official entities.

Off to a great start is Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia, whose story theatre musical Civil War Voices, based on period diaries and letters, is on tour through Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey.  Back home they are in the midst of their run of The Road to Appomattox, a world premiere by Catherine Bush that pairs the story of a modern day married couple considering divorce with the story of Lee preparing to surrender to Grant.

Elsewhere in Virginia earlier this year was Rappahannock County by Ricky Ian Gordon and Mark Campbell, another musical based on Civil War diaries and letters, which premiered at the Virginia Arts Festival in April as a joint commission by the Festival, the University of Richmond, Virginia Opera, and the University of Texas at Austin.  It played the Texas leg of its premiere last month.   

In the Shenandoah Valley, Wayside Theatre (which is run by my old Body Politic Theatre colleague Warner Crocker--Hi, Warner!) began its 50th anniversary season with the 1999 pastiche Reunion ... A Musical Epic in Miniature, about a post-Civil War acting troupe staging a show about the war.  One of the reviews for Reunion went out of its way to deny that slavery was the chief cause of the war, cautioned its readers that the play had a "Northern point of view," and regretted that "a Virginia audience should be prepared — some of them, anyway — for hearing their ancestors referred to as traitors."  Yes, the war is still with us.

Up north, Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man, originally produced by Manhattan Theatre Club in February, is being co-produced by the Jewish Ensemble Theatre in West Bloomfield, Michigan and Plowshares Theatre, an African American company in Detroit.  It's about a Jewish Confederate who returns home after Appomattox and finds his home occupied by a pair of his former, now newly freed, slaves--also Jews, having been raised in the faith of their master's household.  It closed October 2 at JET and is scheduled to re-open at Plowshares in January.

Missing in action as far as I can see so far is James Still's The Heavens Are Hung in Black, which seemed two years ago a contender to be done all over the country during the sesquicentennial.  It was commissioned by Ford's Theatre, no less, and premiered there for the Lincoln bicentenary in 2009.  The play depicts Lincoln during five months in 1862 from the death of his son Willie through the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.  It had a second production, also in 2009, at Indiana Rep, where Still was resident playwright, but seems not to have had a third one yet.  Of course, 2012 will be the sesquicentennial year of the events it depicts, so maybe there'll be a major production of it then.

A Civil War Christmas by Paula Vogel, though there is at least one production scheduled this year, also seems to be underperforming what appeared to be its potential not long ago.  It premiered in 2008 at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, and went on to productions in Boston, Chicago (at Northlight, so really in Skokie) and Palo Alto.  It's a sentimental imagining of Christmas in 1864 Washington, featuring a raft of period Christmas songs, so it seemed poised to become an annual event at theatres at least through 2015.  But the only production this year I can find online is at History Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I'll post information on more Civil War shows here in Chicago and around the country as I learn of them.