Battle Hymn
In the midst of a Civil War battlefield soaked with blood and laden with bodies, Martha, a pregnant teenager, begins to feel pain. Not just the pain of labor, but the pain of seeing firsthand the wounds of war. "The landscape is nothing but bodies piled like stones up to the heavens," says the Bible-quoting Kentucky-bred mother, disguised in the uniform of a Union soldier. Surveying the scene of devastation, Martha vows that she won't give birth in such a violent country. Cradling the baby in her belly as she treks westward in search of a safer place, she waits and waits and waits … for 150 years.
This is the compelling premise of "Battle Hymn," a play by Jim Leonard receiving its world premiere in a Circle X Theatre Co. production at the Ford Theatres complex. At times silly and whimsical, at times serious and poignant, the piece sweeps through transitional periods of American history, with Martha's personal odyssey serving as an allegory for the country's own struggle to deliver on its promise. We follow the perpetually pregnant single mother from her moonlit romance with a Union soldier who fathers her child before going off to fight, to a lonely prairie where she laments with singing cows, to the psychedelic scene in San Francisco, where she discovers violent conflict once again, this time in the form of the Vietnam War. Although Martha's achingly long search for a respite from violence loses some of its force and focus in the second half of the play, "Battle Hymn" is never less than fully engrossing. The play’s succession of alternately lyrical and comically quirky passages are brought to palpable life with powerful performances (most notably Suzy Jane Hunt's Martha) and a highly imaginative staging.
Leonard's landscape is peopled with desperate characters in search of transcendence -- through religion, sex, drugs, and violence. While on her journey, Martha meets ruffians on a train who plan to rob and rape her, a ragged man on a spiritual pilgrimage as he awaits the Apocalypse, a freed slave who aggressively attacks his master, and a Freudian psychiatrist eager to test psychoanalytic theories and lobotomize his patients. "I feel like I'm cursed as the world keeps getting worse," Martha proclaims at one point. Disowned by her preacher father, who calls her a harlot for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, Martha has plenty of grim experiences to cite alongside her ability to "talk Bible for miles."
However, alongside scenes of violence and intolerance, the play gestures towards a more progressive future with the inclusion of an interracial homosexual romance during the Civil War era and the gender-bending, race-swapping role-playing of the ensemble throughout the various historical periods. Leonard's characters aren't willing to give up hope on utopia. Carrying a suitcase filled with the bones of his dead lover, Lanford, a Civil War survivor who heads west, rhapsodically exclaims, "There’s no killing in my country. ... We all live forever.”
Director John Langs ably balances the farcical antics with intimate moments in Leonard's imaginative epic. With her magnetic performance, Hunt keeps us hanging on Martha's every word as she tries to decipher dreams of maternal tenderness while witnessing the world's brutality. Bill Heck shifts smoothly from the endearingly shy Henry, Martha’s lover, to a female patient in the psych ward who thinks she's the Virgin Mary, and then to a 21st-century reincarnation of Henry as a callous stockbroker. William Salyers, Robert Manning Jr., and John Short are similarly skilled in chameleonic transformations as they go time-tripping through American history.
Brian Sidney Bembridge’s scenic and lighting design lend a moody poignance to the proceedings, with light emanating from chinks in a fence, which later serves as a surface for the projection of images of World War II soldiers and Sixties protests, all the way up to the present-day conflict in Gaza. Also contributing to the high-quality production values are Cricket S. Myers' sound design, Jen Kays’ scenic painting, and Dianne K. Graebner’s costume design. Original music by Michael A. Levine gently underscores the play's themes as Martha struggles to find a place for her child in a lamentably brutal world.
Performances of "Battle Hymn" run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7 p.m., through February 21 at [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood, (323) 461-3673, www.fordtheatres.org.
EXTENDED Through March 7h, 2009