LEANDER STILLWELL
Watching the play unfold, you can see that Rush knows this period inside out. All of his characters are pitch perfect. The soldiers sound like soldiers, the farmers like farmers. Leander’s father (ably played by Greg Bryant) is every inch the protective, pragmatic parent, Leander himself every inch a romantic, glory-drunk young recruit. And Rush has peppered the dialogue with dozens of expressions that have since fallen out of use: “beholden,” “wumped,” “quick step” (a disease), “going to see the elephant” (going into combat for the first time).
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But Blinkoff’s dispassionate Stillwell is only a symptom, not the cause, of a deeper problem: somehow Rush, in re-creating the world of Civil War America, lost its soul. In Leander Stillwell we sense the war’s sweep, learn scores of facts, get introduced to dozens of characters, but rarely are we allowed to see the human beings who make these carefully re-created scenes happen. This emptiness at the heart of the play seems all the greater when I remember the deep, sad feeling I had leaving Charles Pike’s dramatic reading of Whitman’s Civil War poems, The Wound Dresser. In that production Pike and company, with the help of Walt Whitman, made certain we felt the Civil War in all its horror and pain.
