Notes from the rehearsal hall:

ANTEBELLUM

by Miriam Weisfeld, production dramaturg

 

The playwright Robert O’Hara wants to investigate passion between unconventional lovers.  “You don’t see romances with Black people or Jews very much, dealing with race and sexuality,” he said last week during rehearsals for his play ANTEBELLUM.  He’s set his play at one of the most romantic moments in our history: the world premiere of MGM’s sweeping film Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, 1939.  Here at Woolly we’ve been researching the premiere, which comprised a three-day festival of balls, parades, and a screening with Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, and their real-life partners Carole Lombard and Laurence Olivier.  Georgia’s Governor declared a holiday, and thousands of Atlantans crowded the streets to catch a glimpse as Hollywood descended on author Margaret Mitchell’s home town in a carnival of nostalgia for the pre-Civil War South.

Robert views the romance of that event through a complicated lens.  The characters in his play occupy a former plantation home much like Scarlett’s, but as he tells us, “to this day, I still can’t imagine going to a plantation.”  With a tart chuckle, Robert goes on: “They’re sort of museums now and there’s a decency and protocol to visiting.  Like, ‘this is Monticello: this is where they churned butter!’  But to me, it’s a concentration camp.”  The comparison is apt—the same year Gone with the Wind swept the country with nostalgia for the days of slavery, the Nazis began their invasion of Europe.

That cruel coincidence takes us to the passion between unconventional lovers in Robert’s play.  Despite MGM’s glamorous stereotypes, the oppressed people of history also fell in love, witnessed earth-shattering events, and made painful choices in order to survive.  As Margaret Mitchell famously said upon the publication of her bestselling book: “If the novel has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under...? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn't."

The characters of ANTEBELLUM have a passion you’ve never seen onstage before, and gumption like you wouldn’t believe.

 

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