Stuart Carden

Director, Butler

We’re off and away with rehearsals for Richard Strand’s fascinating Civil War play Butler. It is a terrific and moving piece of historical fiction and, given the setting, quite surprisingly a deeply funny play.

The early days of rehearsal for any play, but especially one so steeped in history, is filled with an incredible amount of talk. We lean heavily on our dramaturg, Lauren Shouse, to help support the research we’ve each individually done on both the historical figures that inhabit the play as well as context of how the events in the play intersect and are informed by the larger context of the American Civil War.

The Civil War has been so deeply documented and written about that there are more than 50,0000 books and pamphlets about it, at least one book or pamphlet published every day since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April of 1861. So the historical research is both daunting and seductive; we are definitely enjoying putting on our amateur historian hats. We are also equally focused in these early days on the playwright Richard Strand’s words.

The goal in the first few days of rehearsal is to create a vast and deep lake of information about the characters and their relationships upon which one might draw inspiration from throughout the rehearsal process that will sustain you through performances. This means naming all the things big and small that we know from the text, sharing what we intuit, testing what we believe or teasing out a mysterious action, phrase or even word.

One of those words that particularly drew our attention today was “sanctuary”. A person asking for “sanctuary” over “refuge” or “protection” or “asylum” has such resonant implications. Days like today where we interrogate the text for clues are some of the most thrilling.