With six World Premiere Wisconsin plays opening next weekend, this blog post offers you not one preview, but two, involving world premieres that ostensibly have nothing in common but their debut date of Friday, May 19; they don’t even open at the same time or in the same city that night.
But both Play-by-Play Theatre’s Lincoln & Liberty Too and Pile of Cats Theatre’s There’s An App 4 That prove anew that juxtaposed plays talk to each other.
In this case, that conversation begins with a teenager’s quest to learn more about an ancestor’s fight for human freedom. It ends with a meditation on what’s happening to humanity, in a tech-driven world where we risk forfeiting every freedom we’ve won and no longer know what’s worth fighting for.
Let’s listen in on parts of that conversation, which I’ll continue to channel when I report back with reflections on each show after seeing them later this month.
Answering Lincoln’s Call
When Ralph Ehlinger was a teenager, he wrote Andersonville National Historic Site, home to the Confederacy’s infamous Andersonville Prison. Nearly one third of its Union prisoners died of starvation or disease; Ralph’s correspondence confirmed that one of the prisoners who’d been held there had been Ralph’s great-great grandfather, Peter.
“Learning more about him became a life-long obsession,” Ralph said to me during a recent phone conversation with him and his sister Mary, who’ve collaborated on the musical Lincoln & Liberty Too, playing in DePere next weekend.
The pandemic gave the siblings the time they needed to shape all that Ralph had learned into a story, with Ralph writing the book and lyrics and Mary creating the score.
Having emigrated from Luxembourg, Peter and Jennie Ehlinger had been working as tenant farmers near Manitowoc for a decade and the Civil War was already underway when they were confronted with mounting social pressure to join the Union’s fight for freedom.
The Peter we meet in the Ehlingers’ musical doesn’t want to go; while he knows slavery is wrong, he believes his first commitment is to farm and family, safely separate from a war he didn’t want or start. “You are my cause,” he says to Jennie. “You and the children.”
“Me, the children, and the kind of country we are going to make for them,” Jennie replies, insisting that he must go and fight for a future worth inhabiting.
“I wanted to make Jennie the heroine of the show, and I also wanted to emphasize the patriotism within this community,” Ralph said. “We are the beneficiaries of their hope; they are the reason the dream of a better world here has survived.”
Even as he honored the milieu within which his ancestors lived – including the deep religious faith which “played a major role in giving these immigrants the strength to hold together” – Ralph simultaneously wanted to drive home the parallels between their world and our own, as we wrestle with a similar tension between civic good and familial obligation.
“Some people said I should antiquate the language,” Ralph said, “but I deliberately chose not to do so. I wanted to write in a way that would allow a modern couple to see the parallels between the choices Jennie and Peter faced and their own choices.”
As Mary pointed out, those parallels extend to the musical’s emphasis on immigrants, at a time when they were subjected to the same sort of discrimination confronting immigrants today.
That background drives many of the musical choices Mary made, as both a composer and, in the case of public domain material, arranger.
There’s a Gregorian chant, reflecting the immigrants’ Catholic heritage. A polka and a traditional German lullaby. An American folk song and Lincoln’s 1860 campaign song. Mary has rearranged some of them, giving them what she describes as “a more contemporary spin”; her own compositions will feature both repeating motifs and structured dissonance.
In short, the music will feature something old and something new, while underscoring the tension involved in any effort to weave together the competing strands of the American story. Making sense of our collective past will never come easy. But as the Ehlingers’ musical makes clear, it’s essential to discovering and grounding who we are, as individuals and as a country.
Losing Ourselves in Our Phones
While Lincoln & Liberty Too is about discovering who we are within the crucible of history, Ned O’Reilly’s There’s An App 4 That features characters imagining they’ve escaped from history. As its title suggests, their reality isn’t grounded in the here and now, but virtually mediated through their phones.
Midway through O’Reilly’s chewy satire with darkening edges, the main character – a nonbinary 20-something named Didi – stumbles awake from a dream in which there’s an app for everything they do, from learning to dance to styling their hair and from shopping for clothes to fixing dinner.
While that dream leaves Didi dazed and confused, it’s actually the sunny version of Didi’s waking nightmare, in which apps allow them a virtual pet (Didi’s roommate is allergic), a non-shaming alternative to porn, and a simulacrum of a fully cooked meal.
That’s just for starters; I don’t want to spoil the many ingenious ways in which the apps O’Reilly imagines take aim at our increasingly virtual lives.
“I have a love-hate relationship with both technology and social media,” O’Reilly said to me during a recent call.
“On the one hand, the machine I’m holding in my hand as I talk to you is miraculous,” said O’Reilly – who, at 63, is old enough to remember a time before cell phones. “That miracle continues to fascinate me.”
“The hate part involves how these machines mess with our lives and ability to be fully human,” he continued. “They assume things about us – what we are and what, emotionally, we need – that rob us of free will. And what’s truly sinister is that they do so through messaging telling us that what they offer will make us more rather than less human.”
Not to mention that our machines allow those with power to spy on the rest of us.
One of the plotlines in O’Reilly’s play takes dead aim at the surveillance state, through which our employers can watch everything we do, while corporations craft the algorithms suggesting what we should do. In the process, O’Reilly noted, we’re potentially robbed of our privacy and of all that makes us unique.
That flattening of difference is reflected in O’Reilly’s stage directions, which envision his characters living in identical floor units (practically, this allows all three to appear in the same unit set on stage, even though they’re actually occupying different apartments).
“Madison has seen a huge building surge,” O’Reilly said (O’Reilly lives in Madison, and Pile of Cats is a Madison-based company). “It’s all pretty cookie-cutter.”
Despite their hyper-aware identity politics, a similar problem afflicts O’Reilly’s characters.
That’s part of the point and half the fun: these characters loudly proclaim their difference in startlingly similar ways. It’s no accident that one of the apps O’Reilly imagines is called “You Do You,” in which a machine instructs a human being on how to be unique.
“All those apps you’ve been recommending,” Didi says to their best friend, are “crowding out other important things.”
The fur really begins to fly when these apps begin to glitch; it’s an exponentially more confusion version of what we experience when someone tells us that they can’t complete a basic transaction because “the computer won’t let them.” The machines that promised liberation have imprisoned us instead.
Can Didi break free? Can we?
You’ll need to see the show to discover how such questions are addressed. Suffice it to say for now that O’Reilly’s writing steers clear of categorical solutions; he clearly loves his characters, muddles and all. Allowing them the space to be conflicted about who they are and what they’ll become is itself an embodiment of what it means to be human.
Even in a world overrun by AI, there’s no app for that.
Play-by-Play Theatre’s production of Lincoln & Liberty Too runs from May 19-21 at St. Norbert College’s Webb Theatre, 315 3rd St., DePere. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/lincoln-liberty-too-2/.
There’s An App 4 That runs from May 19-27 at the Bartell Theatre, 113 E. Mifflin, St., Madison. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/theres-an-app-for-that-2/.
