In the rancorous aftermath of the 2004 elections, the media showered us with maps of what an all-blue US might look like, removed from the Jesusland of the red states. One demographic’s desire to walk out on the other is certainly nothing new in this nation, and even before the South decided to try going its own way in 1861, there were folks up in New England and New York who were entertaining the idea themselves. Secessionist sentiment up north never made it into action, but one New Hampshire playwright has now asked, What if? The hinge of James Patrick Kelly’s new alternative history of early 19th-century America, The Duel (directed by Blair Hundertmark at the West End Studio Theatre), swings on the 1804 showdown between Alexander Hamilton (Kevin Collins) and Vice President Aaron Burr (Steve Bornstein).
A peeved Burr called for the duel after Hamilton, who disapproved of what he thought were Burr’s secessionist leanings, talked some trash about him at a dinner party, effectively derailing the VP’s bid for the New York governorship. Kelly’s two-act script starts us off amid this “real” history, a build-up to the duel based on historical documents, and at the end of the first act, the guns are fired. We see Hamilton’s aim miss by a mile, just as history has it. But in Kelly’s reimagining of the duel, Burr puts his bullet into the ground instead of Hamilton’s abdomen. Hamilton lives on another seven years and into the fictional Act Two, by which time Burr’s ambitions have taken an extreme turn, and have helped to split the North off into the rebel Confederation of New England States.
To watch all this is to watch the dramatization of an intellectual exercise. Kelly’s twelve characters give us the political background that supports his alternate version of history — in letters exchanged between Burr and Hamilton, recitations of all the dirt the Founders eventually dished on each other, laborious exposition of the inextricable political and personal. His imagined secession is a fascinating hypothetical, but, as drama, sometimes errs — perhaps inevitably — on the side of education. The history — real and imagined — is dense stuff, exhaustively researched and delivered, and it often slows the story’s pace.
As if in compensation, the script frequently swings around to linger briefly on common, human things — Burr’s sensualist and proto-feminist ways with women; Eliza Hamilton’s worries about her husband. Act Two shows us the hard times of regular New England folk by taking us into the impoverished house of the Kelseys. There, Rachel and Polly (Kathleen Somssich and Lisa Richardson) await the return of young Confederation soldier Jonathan (while harboring Burr, now a fugitive from the Union armies). The Duel is at its best when it bridges the politics and the people, and does more showing than telling about the political climate — as when Confederation sergeant Levi Claggett (Thomas Olson) hisses that he’s fighting a government that can cut trees down from his land and “doesn’t know me or care about me.”
