“Astonishing,” or some variation or the word, is said frequently by the four characters in Butler, a historical comedy set at the beginning of the American Civil War. It’s also an apt word for how an audience describes this new play on the St. Germain Stage. Butler takes true-life events that changed the course of history and melds them into high comedy, just as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible used true-life events to create a tragedy as timeless today as in 1953. Butler is just much more astonishingly funny, and much closer to the actual events in Fort Monroe, Va., May 23, 1861, than Miller’s play is to colonial Salem.
Act 1 unfolds in an hour that feels longer, but don’t give into the temptation to sneak out at intermission; Act 1 has a method to its leisureliness that Act 2’s snap more than justifies. The first act rolls out the exposition dilatorily, and for good reason: The actual event seems implausible, but all is true, much more so than in histories by Shakespeare (or Arthur Miller). Plus the languid pace seems in hindsight suited to the Virginia-coast summertime setting and the dilettante officers at the heart of the matter. The events were tailor-made for a historical comedy, and playwright Richard Strand sews and stitches them up so that laughs keep the audience just engaged enough to come back in for Act 2, which is as witty and funny as the protagonist, a rotund Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler of the Union Army (an astonishing David Schramm, who looks like the photographs and cartoons of the real Butler, a man still hated in New Orleans as attested by a 2014 exhibit historical society exhibit on “Beast Butler” and his assault on “Southern hospitality” when he oversaw the occupation of New Orleans during the Civil War).
As Maj. Gen. Butler, newly minted to his rank after serving less than a month, deals first with his West Point adjutant, Lt. Kelly (a believable Ben Cole), expressing at some length the major general’s distaste for the word “demand”—“only President Lincoln, his cabinet, every general who outranks me, and, by the way, my wife” may use the word “demand” with Butler—and then, in a scene “a few minutes later”—when a break is inserted between the first scene and the second one “a few minutes later,” the playwright is either astonishingly languid or astonishingly dilettantish with the audience, the actors, and time itself—with Shepard Mallory (an energetic Maurice Jones), one of three runaway slaves seeking “sanctuary” in Fort Monroe from the Confederate troops across the bay. Scenic designer Brian Prather’s peerless set, brick walls with curved wood beams overhead framing the black-barred double-window upstage center, makes for the perfect setting of Butler and Mallory’s war of words and wills; expressly forbidden to offer “sanctuary” to “property,” Butler meets his match in Shepard Mallory, and maybe a kindred spirit as act one closes on the recalcitrant duo.
Act 2 breezes in and uses the slow waxing and waning of act one to ebb and flow through a stunning series of impressive battles with words. This is made all the more astonishing as Butler’s victory over the dilettante-ish Maj. Cary of the Confederate Army (a perfectly prissy John Hickok) had repercussions that turned the tide of the war and history that reverberates in unseen ways today. (“Black lives matter” would sum up Butler’s actions.) Though the humor is fast and furious in Act 2—“I know how that word is used in the South. I am familiar with the concept of the ‘gentleman farmer.’ As far as I can tell, a Southern gentleman is a man who is too lazy to work,” Butler tells the preening Cary, who is hoisted by his own petard and the South’s traitorous words—there’s a force in Act 2 that drives Butler along to its astonishing conclusion: “Black lives matter.” Fans of history, of comedy, and of words will love Butler, but it has a depth that still resonates today.
photo by Kevin Sprague
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