War

This month we turn our thoughts to Remembrance Day and Veterans Day. If you're looking for meaningful and impactful performances to mark this important time of remembrance, we have a curated list of plays that will help you do just that. Our November collection features plays designed not only to pay tribute but also to start and continue important discussions with your students - whether on the stage or in the classroom.

*Welcome to our Featured Play Spotlight. * Drum Taps by Lindsay Price is a theatrical adaptation of a selection of Walt Whitman’s civil war poems. Available in both large cast and small cast versions, student performers can bring a war-time experience to stage. The poems in Drum Taps represent Walt Whitman’s firsthand account of the Civil War. See the words, the emotion, the blood come to life in this theatrical adaptation. This is not your traditional readers theatre or poetry recital. This is flesh and bone words breathed to their fullest humanity. This is struggle and pain. This is confusion and contradiction. This is war. Why did we publish this play? It’s one thing to read about war in a textbook. It’s another thing to read an account by someone who was there, who can feel every word they write. And it takes on an entirely new meaning when you read a firsthand account of war through a creative genre. Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps poetry illuminates his experience of the Civil War – his passion for it at the beginning, his despair at Lincoln’s death, his visits to the wounded at hospitals, his change of attitude towards war as it drew on. Poetry is hard to stage. It’s a singular experience. I find Whitman’s poetry extremely character-driven. Each poem tells a story. But one genre does not necessarily fit easily into another. A poem is not a play. That was my challenge with my adaptation of Drum Taps – to bring the characters to life and to make it make sense to an audience. Our version of Drum Taps brings war to life in a unique way. It’s a challenge, it’s cross-curricular, it’s a unique theatrical experience. All great reasons to publish a play. Let’s hear from the author!1.Why did you write this play? Adaptation is my favourite style of writing. I like taking something in one form and finding it’s theatricality. I’ve always been fond of Walt Whitman, and had the opportunity to study some poems in detail. And that’s when I started seeing the possibilities. The vivid imagery of the poetry, and really, the first hand account of war really spoke to me. 2. Describe the theme in one or two sentences. War brought to life. 3. What’s the most important visual for you in this play? I think the two images that bookend the play, that also represent Whitman’s changing view of war – the beginning of the war where there is excitement to see the young men in their clean uniforms going off to fight for right, and then the much different tone at the end, as the realities, the death, the anguish of war has been fully realized. Whereas at the beginning characters hold pieces of manuscript up high and proud, at the end (the poem is “To a Certain Civilian”) a character crumples pages of manuscript and throws them to the ground. 4. If you could give one piece of advice for those producing the play, what would it be? Work with the text as is. It’s all Whitman, there are no lines of dialogue that are my own. So don’t change it, don’t modernize it, figure it out. It’s Whitman! 5. Why is this play great for student performers? I think the source material is a vivid and vibrant first hand look at a war that doesn’t have a lot of primary sources. This alone is important. And then the task to bring a theatricality to poetry is a valuable process. I loved writing it and I have loved seeing it in performance!

Welcome to our Featured Play Spotlight. Today we look at ghosts, the civil war, Walt Whitman and ice. Charlie is surrounded by ghosts. The ghost of an estranged father who leaves her an antique musket. The ghost of a classmate’s sister who cautions Charlie, The Grey will hear you. Who are the Grey? Ghosts of Lost Confederate soldiers ambushed following the first battle of Fredericksburg, 1862. As the Aurora Borealis light up the Virginia night sky Charlie must confront the living and the dead. She’s trying to find peace but will she make the right choice? What brings her to the centre of a barely frozen lake with the musket and her ghosts? Beat! Beat! Drums! Blow! Bugles! Blow! Why did we publish this play? Theatre must be theatrical. Period. Which sounds like a given, but that’s not always the case when you’re reading a manuscript. Publishers often only have the printed script to go from (rather than being able to see the play produced). We have to be able to “see” the play on stage, and “see” what it would look like brought to life. The Blue and the Grey is all that and more. It is haunting. It is exhilarating. It is theatrical. There is choral sound work that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. And I haven’t even started talking about the unique, flawed, interesting characters yet. Pick this play up now. Read it now. Buy it now. Let’s hear from the author!1. Why did you write this play? The answer is a deceptively simple, as well as a little complicated. The “deceptively simple” answer is: I wrote this play for my students. The “a little complicated” answer is: Coming off the previous year’s success performing Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope, I wanted to challenge the students, but felt underwhelmed by choices I was seeing from my normal publishing sources. Simultaneously, I had a hankering for a “ghost play,” and had a notion involving Walt Whitman visiting Fredericksburg, Virginia — a historical fact a colleague of mine had recently written some newspaper articles about for local interest. Those two thoughts combined led me to understand exactly how I wanted to challenge my students, and that was with a play that mixed emotion, memory, history, poetry, and hauntings of various sizes, shapes, and textures into something that was uniquely ours. 2. Describe the theme in one or two sentences. The theme is about the difficulty to escape one’s own past — be it personal, local, or national; and how the only way to cope with that difficulty is by making obvious connections in the unlikeliest of places. 3. What’s the most important visual for you in this play? Certainly the climactic image — which was actually my starting point. At the risk of spoiling things, I always knew the most arresting moment would be a modern, teenage girl hammering at the ice beneath her knees with a Civil War-era musket, while Confederate ghost soldiers trained their own muskets at a child in a blue, puffy winter coat. That was literally the first image that came to mind when I had the pieces in place, and I was always writing to that inevitable, inescapable choice for the main character. 4. If you could give one piece of advice for those producing the play, what would it be? Embrace the ephemera of it. I discovered through writing, and through the first production, how dreamlike and surreal the piece was — that some of the transitions and some of the moments developed a real dream-logic to it that I ultimately embraced. Charlie’s line “Was I daydreaming sleep? Or was I a sleeper wishing I was awake?” summed a lot of that quality up for me, and it was a line that we refined and refined throughout production. The sentiment of the line, though, came to me one morning before school started, in that special sleepless restlessness that comes midway through any production. I was walking into the cafeteria of the high school to go check on something in the auditorium, and I heard this underwater-sea-shell noise through the haze of my sleep deprivation. That sound, obviously an audio hallucination of some sort, struck me as the correct tone for the whole piece — the uncertainty of the way reality shifts around you when you’re half-awake and unsure of your surroundings. That’s also when the self-contradictory nature of the line came to me, and when I felt confident in exploring and expanding that quality. 5. Why is this play great for student performers? I originally intended this to be more didactic — to teach the students who performed it more about history, particularly as it happened in our own backyard, an echo of which sentiment I gave to Morrissey early on. As we developed and performed the piece, however, it became clear that dramatic license would overtake the didactic qualities, so what really replaced it? For me, it’s the sense of collaboration, both between myself and the cast, but also among each other. I still have students who remember with fondness their role in the ensemble and the difficulty in, say, matching the rain-tapping in Scene 10 with the emotional intensity of the actor playing Darren. The effect of that moment — of actually listening to, and responding with, the emotional crests effected by that particular actor, and how in tune with each other and each other’s performances they all had to be spoke tremendous volumes to the performances that they each managed from the piece. Though the play is undoubtedly Charlie’s, it’s a play that begs for an ensemble to work together to achieve its effects. So as student performers, they had to be so in touch with each other on an emotional and on a performance level, that surprises, changes, feints, new wellsprings, and old habits could be indulged, experimented with, discovered, exposed, and incorporated by all.

This week on Spread the Love, Lindsay and Craig talk about Letters, a Reader’s Theatre piece by Mrs. Evelyn Merritt.

This week on Spread the Love we talk about Drum Taps – adapted by Lindsay Price from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Filmed live on location at Old Fort Erie.

“The poems in Drum Taps represent Walt Whitman’s firsthand account of the Civil War. See the words, the emotion, the blood come to life in this theatrical adaptation. This is not your traditional readers theatre or poetry recital. This is flesh and bone words breathed to their fullest humanity. This is struggle and pain. This is confusion and contradiction. This is war.” The primary danger in theatricalizing a series of poems is that such adaptations tend to be static – they amount to not much more than a poetry recital with lights and costumes. I’m not dissing poetry recitals, I’m just saying that they’re not inherently theatrical. By the way – can you believe “dissing” passed my spell checker but “theatricalizing” didn’t? I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting when Lindsay told me she was working on an adaptation of Leaves of Grass, a collection of US Civil War-era poems written, modified and rearranged over an entire lifetime by Walt Whitman. I wasn’t familiar with the poems at the time nor, being Canadian, did I have that much knowledge about the US Civil War. But my main concern was this: will it be theatrical? I am proud to report that it is. Even just reading the script I could see the actors, hear the chaos, smell the gunpowder, feel the loss. I can’t wait to see a production of this! Two versions are included in the same book: A small cast version (5 actors – 2M+3W) and a large cast version (20 actors – 6M+14W) . The casting is very flexible, however, and is limited only by the director’s imagination. Genders can be switched for many characters and the cast size can be expanded or contracted fairly easily. Both versions run about 35 minutes, ideal for most contest requirements.