gohawks's review
3.0
I'm a fan of Paula Vogel and the material. Recently, I've been on a Civil War kick. What I'm not a fan of is narration in plays constantly telling you the action. Now, really a play like this couldn't have been done any other way because just one of the stories isn't enough. It's all about how a Confederate soldier, a runaway slave girl, Mary Todd Lincoln and Walt Whitman are all linked. That is why the aspect of having a few people play many different roles works well. But even the shortest scenes require the actors to tell us who they are when they first come on and give us the back story for historical context. This kind of narration is done so often in plays that don't need to be that way that it is just overdone. It annoys me whenever it shows up, though it is appropriate here. Show me, don't tell me. It's theater. That being said, their are some really great scenes: Lincoln riding to recover Mrs. Lincoln's Christmas present and working on his inaugural address, some humor with actors playing a mule and a horse fawning for each other and giving away soldiers' position. And as always with Vogel, the structure, with short scenes building on and flowing into each other back and forth through time, is masterful.
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