The show runs through December 30 at the Taproot Theatre at 204 North 85 th Street in the heart of Greenwood. The links to our own times are all too obvious, making A Civil War Christmas a very timely theatrical gift. Taproot’s Christmas play features a host of characters living in one of the most divided and harshest moments in our nation’s history valiantly searching for peace and comfort. Mark Lund’s set helpfully posts graphics that delineate the constantly shifting settings in and around our nation’s capital. The spiritual “Children Go Where I Send Thee” was particularly rousing. Music director Edd Key helps lighten the many dramatic stories, overseeing a talented collection of singers presenting classic songs. Her story will intersect with the tale of a lost young girl (a charming Evangeline Opongparry) wandering the city’s icy streets seeking shelter, subtly linking this war story with biblical Bethlehem.
Woods portrays the historical figure Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who became a seamstress for the First Lady and later went on to create a charity to aid other freed slaves. Trerise is an embittered African American Union soldier forging on despite having lost his beloved. The play’s focus on newly freed slaves provides some of the best moments of the show. Just four months later Booth will go on to achieve his awful goal. The assassins’ plot will prove to be unsuccessful here. We even meet a gang of conspirators led by John Wilkes Booth (a sinister Chris Shea). Vogel’s narrative lays out nearly a dozen separate Civil War tales involving North and South troops, the White House staff, and a collection of recently freed slaves. Marianne Savell is very effective portraying the tormented Mary Todd Lincoln, soldiering on with her life in the darkest of times. Taproot veteran Robert Gallaher makes for a compelling and quite human Abraham Lincoln, trying to balance the tasks of leading a divided country while maintaining harmony in his family that has recently lost a young child. The three leaders seem nearly overwhelmed by the tragedy of the nightmarish war that has engulfed their lives. Vogel offers us Generals Lee and Grant and President Lincoln to assume the duties. The play opens on a clever riff off the tasks of the Three Wise Men. However, in their program notes, co-directors Karen Lund and Faith Bennett Russell insist the play’s characters, “some historic and some fictional (will) not allow their light to be diminished, despite the darkness around them.” The uplifting theme was greatly appreciated with the intergenerational audience (made up of senior citizens and school children) I joined on a midweek matinee. Christmas trees are almost impossible to find for they have nearly all been burned to warm the shivering troops. The setting is foreboding indeed: few church bells ring because so many have been transformed into cannon balls. Christmas Eve in the late stages of our Civil War. The play’s subtitle is “An American Musical Celebration.” A collection of American folksongs, African American Spirituals and traditional Christmas ballads weaves it way through a busy but compelling narrative occurring on a frozen Washington D.C. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel debuted “A Civil War Christmas” in 2008, but it is finally having a local premiere featuring a large, talented cast working in Greenwood. Taproot Theatre has closed up Bob Cratchit’s ledger book and snuffed out the lights in Scrooge and Marley’s offices to make room for a very different Christmas show.
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