Raising Blue
–Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”
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Set primarily in Charleston during the Union blockade of 1863-’64, Raising Blue is extensively researched, though–as the program notes–Mills has taken liberties with the actual events and personages involved. He invents a connection between the sub’s chief financial backer and namesake–Horace Hunley, a privateer and speculator–and George Dixon, the young captain who commanded the Hunley’s final mission. In Mills’s account, Hunley and Dixon are social acquaintances and rivals for the affections of Queenie Bennett, Dixon’s fiancee. Dixon is a veteran of the bloody battle of Shiloh, surviving it because a gift from Queenie–a gold coin–in his pocket deflected a bullet. (This remarkable element of the tale is true; the coin was recovered when the wreck of the Hunley was discovered in 1995, after a 20-year search.)
Mills’s play is intelligent, evenhanded, and happily free of politics. He doesn’t preach an antiwar message, nor does he demonize his characters–all of them white Confederates. He doesn’t tell us what to think or feel, as so many young playwrights are inclined to do. Instead he lets the story speak for itself, inviting us to consider heroism as a fascinating muddle of motives and impulses. Dixon and his comrades are driven by devotion to a cause–“southern rights”–and by the deep belief that this cause is not only righteous but divinely protected. They see themselves as fighting a war of independence, just as their ancestors had done 80 years earlier. Queenie wonders whether it’s a sin to consider slavery “a curse upon the land,” but hers is an oblique, lonely perspective shaped not by principle but by her response to her family’s suffering in blockade-strangled Charleston.
Raising Blue is not cutting-edge work; it’s a solid, well-made drama that should have a long life in regional and academic theater circles–not to mention its potential as a film or TV property. And Mills’s thoughtful scrutiny of what one character calls “martial ardor,” which both nurtures and wastes men’s potential, gives it a terrible currency. “We got a lot more of the same in store for tomorrow,” says Dixon after one harrowing munitions test. It’s hard not to think he’s right.
