A Message at Midnight
A Message at Midnight — also carried in Ken Bradbury's manuscripts under the alternate titles "Then Pealed the Bells" and "A Hardscrabble Christmas" — is an intimate three-character drama set in a sitting room of the White House on Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1864. It is the third Christmas of the Civil War, and the Union's fortunes hang on news that has not yet come. Mary Todd Lincoln frets over a dinner that is starting late, the President waits patiently for his tardy general, and the war refuses to take a holiday.
The evening's tension is anchored by the long silence from Sherman's army — six weeks without word from sixty-two thousand troops marching without a supply line. Lincoln, weary and distracted, moves between hope and doubt, reading aloud from Southern newspapers about children told that Santa is a Yankee who won't be let through the pickets this year, and about families boiling smokehouse dirt for its salt and cutting up carpets for blanket wool. Against this backdrop of suffering on both sides, the play asks whether grace and remembrance can survive a war — and what Christmas can still mean inside the house of a nation tearing itself apart.
In Bradbury's careful hand, the history is exact and the heart is warm. An author's note acknowledges that Grant in fact spent that Christmas Eve at City Point, Virginia, but explains that the playwright has brought him to Washington for the sake of the story. What follows is less a battle drama than a quiet meditation on duty, marriage, mercy, and the bells that, in Longfellow's words, peal out the promise of peace on earth even in the darkest year.
Cast
- Abraham Lincoln — President of the United States
- Mary Todd Lincoln — First Lady
- General Ulysses S. Grant — Commander of the Union Army
Production Notes
The play is written for a single simple set: a White House sitting room with a table center stage, three chairs, and an imaginary window downstage overlooking the White House lawn. Ken Bradbury's manuscripts include several revisions — among them a fully blocked "tech script" with detailed stage directions — reflecting his ongoing refinement of the piece for performance. An author's note clarifies the historical liberty taken in placing Grant in Washington rather than at the Virginia front on Christmas Eve, 1864.