"Amelia"

"God will punish us for what we have done here." —Mary Chesnut after seeing Andersonville prison

February 23, 2020 — Bryan Halperin brought his play, "Amelia" by Alex Webb to the Winnipesaukee Playhouse (the "Winni") in Meredith, New Hampshire, a year after a successful four-performance run at the Hatbox Theatre. Halperin, one of the co-founders of the Winni, directed this very moving two-actor performance.

Set designer Hannah Joy Hopkins' minimal set consisted of a large wooden four-sided platform lying horizontally on the stage floor, open in the middle, with a post at each corner, and a screen in the background on which dim photographs of the Civil War era were projected.

Sheree Owens portrays Amelia, a headstrong young 19th Century southern woman, opinionated and outspoken, a feminist and women's rights advocate long before these issues were fashionable or even heard of. The program lists Wayne Asbury as "Ethan and others," the others being many diverse characters, male and female, among them Amelia's father, mother, a Union soldier, a Confederate soldier, a slave and others, all without costume changes or any change in his appearance, but masterfully with demeanor, attitude and inflection, in such a way that his many characters are always identifiable.

The play begins just before the Civil War. Amelia simply doesn't know her place in the opinion of her parents and others, shocked by her outspokenness, but Ethan finds it amusing. His tolerance of her opinions lead to a warming of their relationship. When news reaches them that rebels have taken Fort Sumter, Ethan and all other able-bodied men are eager to join Union forces and defeat the Confederacy, a job predicted to take no more than ninety days. Typical of her style, Amelia proposes marriage to Ethan before he reports for duty.

Amelia and Ethan exchange letters early in the war, but after more than two years pass in the estimated ninety-day conflict and Confederate victories pile up, Ethan's letters cease. This begins Amelia's harrowing journey to find Ethan, traveling alone through war zones. Along the way, she encounters a number of Asbury's characters. She's protected by a Union soldier, then later threatened by a sadistic Confederate.

Information Amelia is able to glean about Ethan's whereabouts eventually leads her to Andersonville. In desperation, she cuts her hair, dons a Union uniform and poses as a man. There was little to prepare the audience for the emotional impact of this play. The rather lighthearted beginning gives no indication of the gut-wrenching path it's headed for. Two excellent actors bring home all the brutality, savagery, appalling death toll and deprivation of the war.