Theater Review—

‘A Civil War Christmas’ Is A Fitting Story For The Season

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — A Civil War Christmas (an American Musical Celebration) is having its world premiere on the main stage at Long Wharf. Unless the production is held over, it will only be there until December 21.

If you can possibly manage to fit it in, and you can still get tickets, you really ought to go, because this is the kind of special thing that Long Wharf does, once in a while, mixing plot and music and staging and acting to put together an experience that is both profound and deeply moving.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel spent ten years working on this piece. More ambitious and broader in scope than anything she has done before, it is meant to be an American Christmas Carol. Questioning in her mind why Americans celebrated the holiday each year with a story about Victorian London, she was anxious to examine what she saw as the more specifically American themes of race, inclusiveness,  forgiveness, and the possibility of moving on.

The vehicle for this exploration is the Civil War. Like the Dickens story, it takes place in a single 24-hour period: Christmas Eve, 1864. The setting is Washington D.C, and on the opposing banks of the Potomac River, near Edward’s Ferry, Maryland. Like the Dickens story it uses “ghosts” to evoke painful memories.

With 14 actors portraying multiple roles (including several delightfully stubborn mules and horses) whose paths cross on this night, the play weaves a collection of stories and subplots involving both real and fictional characters.

The War that cost the lives of 600,000 Americans — two percent of the population — is drawing to a close. President Lincoln has been re-elected and is planning his second Inaugural speech. Against a framework of Mr and Mrs Lincolns’ comic efforts to find presents for each other, the more painful stories of common people unfold:

Decatur Bronson, an African-American sergeant in the Union army, grieves and seethes over his beloved wife who has been kidnapped and sold back into slavery, and vows to take no prisoners. Already a hero who will be given the Medal of Honor, he has sworn to kill every rebel soldier he captures.

Hannah, a fugitive slave, heads for Washington with her nine-year-old daughter, Jessa, hoping to find sanctuary “in the President’s house” but the two become separated crossing the Potomac and the little girl is lost somewhere in the freezing winter night.

Raz Franklin, a 13-year old Virginia boy, steals his father’s horse and runs away in the hopes of becoming a Confederate soldier with the guerilla force Mosby’s Raiders.

Moses Levy, a Union soldier who escaped from a Confederate prison camp, lies dying of fever, remembering the kindness of Walt Whitman when the poet worked as a nurse in the armory hospital.

Private Chester Manton Saunders, a Quaker in the Union army, who has vowed never to kill anyone, invents uplifting stories to send home to his abolitionist mother, while being tormented by rebel raiders who steal his clothes.

Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress and personal friend,  mourns the death of her only son, who left college in his freshman year to fight for the Union, and recalls the cruelties and indignities she experienced as a slave before she managed to purchase her own freedom.

And in Surratt’s H Street Boarding House, the murderous fanatic John Wilkes Booth, plots with two cohorts to kidnap the President on Christmas Eve.

The playbill is filled with statistics, underlying Vogel’s point that all of America was heavily invested in the war, and paid a terrible price:

When the Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves on January 1, 1863, and allowed black soldiers to fight in the war, 180,000 black men enlisted in the Union Army. By the end of the war they made up ten percent of the Union ranks and there were more African Americans in the Union army than there were soldiers in the Confederate Army.

There were over 2,000 boys age 14 or younger in the Union ranks, 200,000 of whom were no older than 16.

There were 8,000 Jewish soldiers fighting for the Union, and 3530 Native Americans, of whom 1,018 were killed.

Emotionally the cost of the war was horrendous. Vogel’s play captures the grief and rage and bitterness felt by so many on both sides, even as it also — like the Dickens work — suggests the miraculous possibility of hope, forgiveness, and the resolution for those who are living, to get on with their lives.

Music — which is so emotionally stirring and symbolic — continually enhances the production, as seasonal carols are mixed with songs from the period, including spirituals, marching songs, ballads, jigs, and the beginnings of jazz. “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” “The Unreconstructed Rebel” and many others, with piano, guitar, and drumbeat accompaniment, move the story along.

As a history lesson, a gripping story, and an emotional catharsis, it all works, it all fits, and in the end, Vogel’s work brings tears to the eyes and makes you feel American, and connected. How fitting that the next act is due to be performed in the coming year, on the twentieth of January.