THE WOUND-DRESSER
When Thoreau’s “great fellow” left us–exactly a century ago, on March 26, 1892–it seemed a real death in the family: Walt Whitman was mourned by his devoted readers as fervently as he had mourned Lincoln 25 years before. What Thoreau couldn’t have known is the way that five generations who never got to meet Whitman have nonetheless come to prize him: as an authentic American bard, the singer of himself and of us, the celebrator of the open road and heart, the boon companion whose rollicking and cadenced catalog of people and things captured the hopeful bustle of a bumptious America. He remains a great fellow and, his homosexuality aside, our most representative poet.
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Based on Whitman’s Civil War poems, The Wound-Dresser–Terrapin Theatre’s debut production–is director Charles Pike’s well-wrought tribute to Walt’s work as a male nurse in the Union hospitals. Whitman powerfully documented his painful experiences in the vivid tableaux of his Drum Taps collection (1865), in the homoerotic “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass (where the poet describes the “adhesive love” he has for men), and in the moving letters he wrote, pouring out his feelings as he consoled dying soldiers and encouraged the survivors.
Three strong performances do much to reveal the drama Whitman compressed into his testaments. In “Beat! Beat! Drums!” W. Whitney Spurgeon does stentorian justice to the poet’s sabre-rattling, pro-Union fervor–the bloody results of which Whitman would also record. Jonathan Lavan underlines the loss in “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” a heartbreaking lament over the waste of a young soldier’s life: “I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket, / And buried him where he fell.” With a naturalness that Whitman would have savored, Carrie Chantler recites “Eighteen Sixty-one,” a cascading litany of Whitman’s fulsome (and doomed) hopes for a quick and righteous conclusion to the war.
