News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Andersonville Trial Review

Date: July 14, 2001

"Andersonville Trial': Sobering Civil War Tale

By Nelson Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer

Realism is the name of the game in Jack Marshall's sturdy staging of "The Andersonville Trial," the Saul Levitt drama about the notorious Confederate prison camp where more than 13,000 Union soldiers perished. Marshall and set designer Thomas B. Kennedy turn the little black box theater at the Gunston Arts Center into a 19th-century courtroom; audience members sit on wooden benches all around the action, and when the bailiff says, "All rise," by golly, we all rise.

The American Century Theater came out of the gate in similar style with its first show several years ago. Marshall, the company's artistic director, resurrected Reginald Rose's "Twelve Angry Men" and got sweaty, agitated, persuasive performances from the cast. It was a strong production of a gripping play about the highest ideals of jurisprudence.

Now comes another all-male ensemble pacing, grumbling and erupting in righteous fury as another largely forgotten American playwright holds an ethical question up to the light. The carefully created environment (which includes Marc A. Wright's summery yellow-orange light shining on the actors and audience) sets the stage for another thoughtful show, though Marshall's solemn but uneven cast of 17 overdoes the naturalism a little bit. Argumentative force is sometimes blunted as actors overdo stammers when their characters are under pressure, and the lawyers' steady whispered conferences behind the backs of their hands are part of an occasionally distracting ongoing buzz.

Yet the leading actors move Levitt's ideas along nicely, even when the ideas in this 1959 play begin to have more to do with the war crimes of Nazi Germany than with the charges brought against Henry Wirz, the Confederate captain who ran the Andersonville camp. Andersonville was remarkably atrocious, providing captives with no real shelter and very little food, fresh water or sanitation. Levitt, working from court records, painted a picture of a desperately overcrowded open-air stockade built around a deep and stinking south Georgia swamp.

The first part of the play offers legal fascinations as evidence about Andersonville is presented and refuted, and as contentious lawyers push the envelope of order. (Tempers ran hot; the trial took place just four months after Lincoln was assassinated.) Bruce Rauscher smolders indignantly as Lt. Col. N.P. Chipman, the government prosecutor who can barely rein in his hatred for the South. Nat Benchley gives such a smooth and reasoned performance as Otis H. Baker, Chipman's adversary, that he wins real sympathy for the argument that the Swiss immigrant Wirz (played with hauteur, passion and a generally decent German accent by Charles Matheny) is being railroaded.

With a mortality rate of nearly 30 percent, Andersonville was almost a death camp. Was Wirz, who ran the inhumane place (and who was the only Civil War figure tried for war crimes), merely following orders from higher up? As Nelson Smith, playing the Union general in charge of the proceedings, squirms uncomfortably in the background, Chipman keeps pressing the point that any soldier ought to rebel if his government begins to make unreasonable demands.

You can feel Levitt molding the Civil War material to his own post-World War II era. The play whets your appetite for the nuances of the Andersonville situation (a situation so complex that the argument has never really ended about the justice of Wirz's execution) but then pummels its way toward the post-Nazi question: When ordered to exterminate people, why does anyone comply? That makes the last half hour feel trumped up and a little smug, but it hardly invalidates Levitt's play or TACT's earnest revival.

The Andersonville Trial, by Saul Levitt. Directed by Jack Marshall. Costumes, Kathryn Fuller. With Jake Call, Chris Davenport, Steve Ferry, Mike Goll, David Jourdan, Doug Krentzlin, Randy Lindren, Jason Lott, Ron Pawelkowski, Allen Reed, Dwane Starlin, Lou Swerda, Glenn White. Through Aug. 4 at the Gunston Arts Center, 2700 S. Lang St., Arlington. Call 703-553-8782. "