ADVERSARIES
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The play’s rapid decline isn’t noticeable at first, because it rides the momentum built up in the early scenes. As Adversaries opens, the ghost of Richard Drury, an attorney, confronts the ghost of William Hillyer, a Confederate soldier arrested as a spy just before the end of the Civil War. The two men step back in time to their first meeting, in Hillyer’s jail cell, where the soldier is trying to persuade Drury to represent him.
At first Drury refuses. “I won’t defend a spy,” he says flatly. But then Hillyer reveals that the two have met before. On December 31, 1864, Drury was attending a play at a New York City theater when a fire broke out–one of nine fires set that night in a Confederate attempt to burn down the city. As Drury scrambled toward the exit, he bumped into a bearded man helping a woman escape. Hillyer claims that he was that man, and that he set the fire. Then he says Drury has a professional obligation never to divulge the information.
