'How to Load a Musket' Review: A Play About Reenactors Gets Real

A few years ago, playwright and actress Talene Monahon began to interview reenactors in Virginia, Massachusetts and New York, stitching their responses into “How to Load a Musket,” a largely verbatim piece of theater at 59E59 Theaters, produced by Less Than Rent Theater. Involving and friskily acted — on a too-small stage ringed with props and officer’s coats — the show feels provocative but unfinished, a pieced quilt of overlapping textures and ideas.

The play begins in 2015 with a group of Revolutionary War reenactors in Massachusetts who speak — feelingly, nasally — about their hobby. “There’s this yearning to just go back,” says Terry (Lucy Taylor), a fife player. We meet David (Adam Chanler-Berat), a teenager in it for cocked hats and the hope of getting a living history gig, and Larry (Andy Taylor), who plasters his dental office in memorabilia.

Under Jaki Bradley’s direction, the tone is playful, occasionally mocking and intercutting sly. Terry complains about “farbs” — reenactor lightweights — and Larry confesses that he smuggles a Walmart cooler into his soldier’s tent. Gradually, the script introduces Civil War reenactors, like Jeffrey Bibb (Richard Topol), a painter. “Everything that I do,” he says, “I want it to look like an accurate view of history. What it was like. And this idea of America.”

But the idea of America isn’t a fixed one, and the present has a funny way of impinging on the past. Monahon’s research straddles the election of President Donald Trump, and the play darkens as most of the reenactors come to understand or explain their practice differently. The Minute Men, Larry’s company, refuse to march at the inauguration. “We took a political stance, but in essence, we did it so we wouldn’t look political,” Bill (Chanler-Berat again) says. Some reenactors are pepper-sprayed; a bomb threat interrupts a battle. The Civil War reenactors feel compelled to defend themselves. “I am so tired of being lumped into a category as being racist,” Jeffrey complains, moments after he has compared the dismantling of Confederate monuments to “a genocide that’s going on against my heritage.”

A line like that is going to upset a lot of people in the audience. It clearly upsets Monahon, too, who introduces herself into the narrative as TM (Carolyn Braver), a young woman in conversation with artist Dread Scott (David J. Cork). She now wonders if the tone she took in her interviews, “neutral empathetic,” was the right one. Scott’s own recent reenactment, of an 1811 slave rebellion, gives the piece a kind of ending, but it can’t really end, because it can’t really reconcile its competing impulses — anthropological, dramatic, political; teasing, sympathetic, analytical.

Recently, I had mentioned to my husband that it might be fun to see the reenactment of the Battle of Brooklyn (my 3-year-old is weirdly obsessed), which Green-Wood Cemetery hosts every spring. Now I’m not so sure. It’s a Revolutionary War battle, so a less vexed one, and the colonists lost, so it’s not so macho. But I’m shakier about what it means to perform it again.

We all know the George Santayana line, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But what if you do remember the past? And you go on repeating it anyway?

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‘How to Load a Musket’

Through Jan. 26 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

'How to Load a Musket' Review: A Play About Reenactors Gets Real

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