THIS
DIVIDED EARTH

I am an admirer of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s Widows and felt it might make for an interesting process to take the basic premise of that play (refugee women demand from an army of occupation the truth behind the disappearance of their men) and transpose the location from Pinochet’s Chile to Civil War America.

The 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (in 2013) and recent high-profile Hollywood movies (Kushner again, with the screenplay for Lincoln) appear to have stimulated an interest in this period for a new generation. This Divided Earth aims to explore some of the issues arising from “the war between the states” in what I hope is an accessible and intimate manner.

Key sources drawn upon include Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering and Ric Burns’ documentary version of it, Death and the Civil War. 600,000 lives were lost through combat and disease – or six million, as an equivalent proportion of today’s US population. Gilpin and Burns examine how this staggering death toll “permanently altered the psyche of the American people … [as] contending with slaughter on an unprecedented scale posed challenges for which there were no ready answers.”

It was Northern women, in particular, who most effectively “improvised new solutions, new institutions, new ways” of tending the wounded; providing for veterans; and (aided greatly by freed slaves) recording, commemorating and burying the dead.

This Divided Earth focuses on the attempts of one such ‘Ladies’ Society’ to identify the unmarked graves of the fallen, deep in enemy territory. Such attempts, naturally, brought Northern women into conflict with their Southern counterparts, whose own losses were often more terrible still.

The Civil War also saw a considerable increase in the popularity of photography (from Matthew Brady’s remarkable battlefield record to the personal portraits prized by combatants and their families alike.) These images provided the template for our approach to the video projections integral to the design of the premiere production.

And the rousing, haunting, divisive ‘folk’ music of the time afforded our musical director, Andrew Friesner, the opportunity to produce the kind of choral arrangements and original score which have characterised our past collaborations. I would encourage the use of a similar score in any future staging of the play.

The Civil War led to the abolition of slavery, the assassination and virtual canonization of Abraham Lincoln, and a lingering resentment felt even today in much of the South. I must confess, however, that in This Divided Earth dispassionate historiography plays second fiddle to a study of the more picaresque consequences of war: the manifold increase in prostitution, venereal disease and opium addiction.

Steven Dykes, May 2012