Playwright: adapted by Karen Tarjan from the book by Michael Shaara
At: Lifeline Theatre,
6912 N. Glenwood Ave.
Phone: (773) 761-4477; $20
Runs through: April 18
If it takes at least two pilots to guide us through a televised football game, whatever made Karen Tarjan and Ned Mochel think they could coherently replicate field warfare on a 28 X 30-foot stage, using only nine actors? Granted, they HAD fitted Lord Of The Rings to the same space and workforce. But fiction focuses on characters, histories on facts, and therein lies the problem.
The Battle of Gettysburg is nowadays memorialized with shintoistic reverence by descendants of those who fought in it. Michael Shaara, one of these, has painstakingly researched the personalities shaping the conflict that determined the war's outcome after two years of bloody civil strife. But in order to understand what occurred on that fatal day in 1863, we must know the events leading up to it. And so for the first hour, we are peppered with facts—whose troops are where, their recent victories and defeats, the combatants' home states (or countries), the configuration of their fortifications and a barrage of period military jargon, our confusion exacerbated by ensemble casting that has every actor playing multiple roles with nothing more than the uniforms to tell us which side we're on.
In the second act, however, our disorientation abates somewhat. Mochel provides us a strategy map (a prop previously employed to great success in their Tolkien epics) as well as a bevy of scholarly historians—also played by the company—to explain its iconography. And Tarjan's script assumes a microcosmic focus, with actors more closely identifiable as the key players in this grim game. By the time we view a bayonet charge (ordered as a desperate attempt to—well, SCARE away the enemy after the attackers' ammunition has been depleted), we are sufficiently comfortable within our environment to understand, and to care, about the stakes in their reckless gamble.
The theatrical values in this Lifeline production are above reproach, but they cannot overcome its conceptual difficulties. The printed word—and, to a lesser degree, cinema—are capable of conveying the scope and power of The Killer Angels, but the immensity of offstage elements necessitated by live performance and limited resources ultimately proves too much for the imaginations of even the most seasoned playgoers.