While Daniel Day Lewis’s eerily precise embodiment of the 16th president in Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated Lincoln will go down as one of the Great Emancipator’s finest portrayals, another layer of Lincoln his yet to be discovered in Georgetown’s A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel with music by Daryl Waters, A Civil War Christmas makes its D.C. Premiere in the Davis Performing Arts Center on Nov. 17. A special holiday production, Civil War is co-produced by the Georgetown University Theater & Performance Studies Program, the Music Program, and Nomadic Theatre.
While this work may surprise those expecting the typical holiday canon, director Prof. Nadia Mahdi explained in an interview with the Voice that the department chose Civil War exactly because it wasn’t The Christmas Carol or The Nutcracker.
”The play is wonderful and surprising and such a great thing to see instead of your typical holiday fare,” she said, adding that it’s interesting “to see a play written by a living playwright, focused on American history instead of Dickens’s England.”
Similarly, Civil War was selected for how well it fits into the Performing Arts Department’s season theme of “War and Peace.” Mahdi described the play’s draw, its setting on Christmas Eve, as “a window of peace” in the midst of the U.S. Civil War, which “challenges our conceptions about how war and peace work.”
This overlap of ideas of war and peace is further illuminated by the show’s music. Drawing on carols and hymns of the Underground Railroad, Water’s contemporary arrangements of these songs pull the story together.
While Civil War intrigues as an atypical holiday production, the play’s most fascinating element is actually offstage: an exhibit in the Davis lobby exploring Georgetown’s Civil War history. Arranged by dramaturges Nina Billone Prieur, Ph.D., an assistant professor, and Sasha Elkin (COL ‘14), with the help of G.U. archivists, this exhibition aims to create “a space in which the audience can immerse themselves into the context of the show…at a more personal level than, say, a museum exhibit,” Elkin explained in an interview with the Voice.
Whether you want to see student attempts to rival Lewis’s uncanny Lincoln portrayal or to learn about how Georgetown evolved from a bastion of the Confederacy into a stronghold for the tri-state, A Civil War Christmas hopes to appeal to Scrooges and Tiny Tims alike.
