US universities to produce new Civil War plays

WASHINGTON: Four major universities are joining theater companies in Boston, Baltimore, Washington and Atlanta in a project to commission new plays about the Civil War and its lasting legacy 150 years later.
The National Civil War Project was announced yesterday in Washington and involved programming over the next two years to mark the 150th anniversary of the war between the North and the South.
Beyond commissioning new works, organizers plan for university faculty to integrate the arts into their academic programs on campus.
At Harvard, a new piece called “The Boston Abolitionists” about the abolitionist movement and the trial of a fugitive slave will be performed in May. Separately, Matthew Aucoin, an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, is using Walt Whitman’s poetry about being a medic to develop a new opera.
In Atlanta, Alliance Theatre and Emory will develop a new theatrical production of US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Native Guard,” with a workshop planned for 2014. It recounts the story of a black Civil War regiment assigned to guard white Confederate soldiers on Ship Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, who helped guide the project, said this is a chance to reevaluate the Civil War and consider the issues that still resonate in American life.
“This is an anniversary of what is arguably one of the most important times in American history,” she said. “And the same questions behind state rights and civil rights continue to infuse who we are as a country.”
In September, the University of Maryland will host a national conference on civil rights and health disparities among minority populations to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Choreographer Liz Lerman, a 2002 MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, helped in developing the partnerships between theaters and universities during a semester spent at Harvard. She said artists can help professors animate their scholarship as more traditional lectures move online, and the Civil War is a good subject to connect art and academics.
“It’s something about the fact that we’re still trying to understand it,” Lerman said. “There are enough civil wars still going on in the world, I myself am trying to understand what it must be like.”
Lerman is developing a new dance theater piece in Washington called “Healing Wars” to explore the role of women and innovations in healing for amputees from the Civil War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Characters will migrate between past and present. The piece will feature actor Bill Pullman and eight dancers.