This past weekend, each of the three World Premiere Wisconsin plays I saw – Margaret in Madison, Lincoln & Liberty Too in DePere, and The Kenosha Verbatim Project in Kenosha – involved versions of civil war, with communities tearing themselves apart because they could no longer figure out how to come together.
How does this happen? Is the resulting death and destruction ever worth it? Are there times when so much is at stake that we need to stand up and fight, even when this potentially means turning on neighbors, family, and friends? And when the fighting finally ends, how do we find common ground on which to stand so that we might once again move forward?
I. Prologue: Chaos and Confusion
Why are Shakespeare’s War of the Roses plays suddenly so popular?
They’re reprised through The Game of Thrones, which a delightful British mockumentary designates as Shakespeare’s greatest play (I’m referring to the fictional Philomena Cunk’s Cunk on Shakespeare, for those keeping score).
They’ve recently received prominent, first-class productions from Chicago Shakespeare, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and New York’s National Asian American Theatre Company, in a staging that garnered multiple Drama Desk nominations.
And thanks to Arden Gray’s Illyria Productions, they’ve even found a home in World Premiere Wisconsin, through a reading in Madison of Margaret, the Marcella Kearns adaptation of the Henry VI plays (with a bit of Richard III thrown in for good measure) that I attended Sunday evening.
Watching Illyria’s nine actors conjure these plays’ vasty fields and countless characters on its modest wooden stage, I was reminded anew that while it was written more than 400 years ago – recalling events unfolding more than half a millennium ago – the Henry VI trilogy speaks to us now because it features a world bearing an uncanny resemblance to 21st-century America:
A disconnect between angry, inflammatory rhetoric and a sordid underlying reality, involving a civil war that has little to do with principle or governance and everything to do with the greedy grasp for position and power.
Contempt for everyday people, routinely ignored and disparaged.
Manufactured truth, in a world where news is often fake, history is alternately ignored or weaponized, the past is reduced to nostalgia, and fraying family ties are less about love than leverage.
There’s no room in such a world for a weak king like Henry, whose naive piety is both self-absorbed and maddeningly self-indulgent, underscoring that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. But what’s a good soul with a moral compass to do, when the only apparent alternative involves forfeiting what it means to be human?
That’s what happens to Margaret herself, foregrounded in Kearns’ adaptation and centered in Gray’s production. With four actors sitting to each side of her, Rey Nevinskaya’s Margaret morphs from shy girl to cursing crone, a proto-Lady Macbeth taking on Giovanna Iosso’s frightening Duke of Gloucester, en route to his murderous reign as Richard III.
Meanwhile, similarly named characters cavalierly switch allegiances, fighting and dying only to emerge as new characters, nearly indistinguishable from those who’d gone before – especially when embodied by the same Illyria actors, with nary a costume change to mark them as different.
And that’s the point.
In further distinguishing fully costumed characters through white and red roses as well as live video capture, the RSC production may have helped audience members keep Shakespeare’s characters straight.
But Illyria’s barebones reading drives home what actually happens when a civil war like this one is about power rather than principle: people lose their individuality and their humanity, instead becoming fungible cogs in a war machine producing sound and fury that signifies nothing. Yes, it’s confusing. It should be.
II. Watershed: Family and Freedom
Two nights before watching Margaret, I’d seen the debut of Play-by-Play Theatre’s Lincoln & Liberty Too, involving the very different civil war that claimed more American lives than both world wars combined.
Mary and Ralph Ehlinger’s musical begins with a mini-version of the fierce war raging on battlefields throughout the South: supporters and detractors of President Lincoln square off outside a Wisconsin courthouse, debating what the war is for and whether it’s worth fighting.
That same question consumes Peter and Jennie, who’d married in and then emigrated from Luxembourg, coming to America to escape war rather than fight it; they’re also the sibling authors’ great-great grandparents.
Embodied by gorgeously voiced (and real-life marrieds) Kaara McHugh and Ben Olejniczak, Peter and Jennie reach the painstaking conclusion that if they want to place faith and family first, they’ll need to fight and sacrifice for freedom, in a country Lincoln had rightly recognized could not survive as a house divided, half slave and half free.
Aaron Reynolds drives that point home, making his way toward the stage from the back of the house as a Black union soldier giving a stirring rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” – and simultaneously making clear that a country in which men like him can’t stand tall is no country at all.
Reynolds’ entrance is purposefully sandwiched by a frolicking number in which Peter and two of his children imagine the larks they’ll have when the fighting is done and a heartbreaking number in which Peter and Jennie say goodbye to each other.
The message is clear, for those long-ago Ehlingers and for their many descendants in the house on Friday night:
While the legacy we pass on may center on life and love among our immediate family, that legacy will means little if it doesn’t spread outward, engaging the world and fighting to make it free. When a family becomes a fortress, it’s reduced to a fief, in a medieval world resembling the isolating, strife-filled England inhabited by Margaret.
To its credit, Lincoln & Liberty Too never glamorizes war, no matter how just and necessary it can sometimes be. “This war is making everyone blind,” Peter says at one point, while wrestling with his own shame at killing boys on the other side – and increasingly aware as he does so of how much they have in common.
But even as Lincoln & Liberty Too toggles between Civil War battlefields and the Ehlingers’ Wisconsin farm – thereby emphasizing all that’s been left behind and all the reasons for missing it – Peter’s conviction that he’s done the right thing grows ever stronger.
“I want our children to be proud of me,” he says toward the end, writing from the hellish Andersonville prison in Georgia. “I don’t want them to live their lives in hate and anger.” In this civil war, putting on a uniform becomes the best way – perhaps the only way – to make such a future come true.
III. Aftermath: Equity and Inclusion
During 1860-61, Lincoln served as trustee of the school that’s now known as Carthage College, nestled along Lake Michigan in the Kenosha where, three years ago, Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by a Kenosha police officer.
Saturday night, I sat in a Carthage theater alongside Kenosha residents who’d experienced firsthand what life in their city was life during the ensuing mayhem, which included Kyle Rittenhouse killing two protesters and severely wounding a third before somehow being acquitted.
We were gathered together there to hear the first of what will hopefully be many presentations of The Kenosha Verbatim Project, through which Nora Carroll, Rayven Craft, Katherine Layendecker and Martin McClendon serve as conduits, channeling the words of the twelve Kenosha residents they interviewed about life in a city divided.
“Every time I read this script, I get emotional,” McClendon said during a talkback afterward.
I know how McClendon feels.
While I’d myself read the Carthage script several times during the past few weeks, I was floored all over again while listening to twelve actors describe a city and country divided by all the ways in which racism continues to blight our lives, 150 years after we waged a war to set us free from our worst selves. History in America remains a nightmare, from which we never seem to wake.
For all that, the abiding message of The Kenosha Verbatim Project is that our current civil war might well end better than the last one did – with love this time vanquishing hate and malice toward none – if we could summon the courage to talk to each other rather than screaming past each other.
Numerous participants in The Kenosha Verbatim Project – both white and Black – echo the plea made by one of them: “just try to have an open conversation.”
As woven together by the four Carthage editors, that’s what we get as we watch the actors embodying these residents – each, significantly, sitting in a differently styled chair, as if to emphasize what’s unique and individual about every one of them – collectively craft a shared history of their community.
Such sharing doesn’t try to eliminate or ignore difference – emphasized not only by the distinct chairs, but also by placing the four embodied white residents at the margins so that actors playing the eight Black residents occupy center stage.
While such an arrangement offers long overdue changes to the shape of the narrative, The Kenosha Verbatim Project simultaneously suggests that we can indeed learn to tell our story together, standing up for what we believe and hashing out where we differ without killing each other.
As with Peter and Jennie in Lincoln & Liberty Too, the Kenosha residents we meet here don’t just live and act for themselves, but also for their kids, as part of a collective investment in a better future.
“We don’t want our grandchildren, our children and generations to come to be sitting at the same precipice” that we are, says one. “Your kids are watching how you respond to all of this,” says another. “We got to carve that space for our young people,” says a third.
McClendon, who has invested a great deal of his professional life in helping young people, has a poster of Lincoln in his office, urging us to “seek truth.”
That’s what verbatim plays like this one do. Dialing down the rhetoric, they dare to believe that if we simply listen to each other, we’ll actually learn to be better; maybe the arc of history really can bend toward justice, so that we make it together to the other side.
We don’t need to live in a society where our politicians and pundits offer screaming reprises of the War of the Roses; instead of fighting endless civil wars, maybe we can learn to actually be civil to one another.
One of the interviewed Kenosha residents got it exactly right: “It’s about building a playpen, where we all can live well together.”
The productions discussed here are now closed; you can learn more about all three as well as every other World Premiere Wisconsin show – and read blog posts featuring each of them – by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/.
