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A Hardscrabble Christmas

2016 · Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site (Grant's Farm), St. Louis, Missouri

It is Christmas Eve, 1864, and the White House waits in suspense. President Lincoln paces, holding a southern newspaper, while six weeks have passed without a word from General Sherman, who has marched 62,000 Union troops toward Savannah with no supply line behind them. A victory could hasten the end of the war and clear the way for the 13th Amendment; a defeat could undo everything. Into this anxious evening, Mary Todd Lincoln frets over a late guest and an unwelcome cigar, and General Grant arrives, having made a long and risky journey from the front for a few stolen hours away from the war.

Commissioned by the National Park Service for the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, the three-person play centers on Grant — the shy, much-failed man Lincoln gambled on and who repaid that faith by winning the war. "He failed at nearly everything except winning the Civil War," Bradbury said of his subject. The play also draws on the uneasy relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Julia Grant, and quietly threads the human cost of the conflict through letters and newspaper accounts of families, North and South, trying to find Christmas amid the bleeding. As Bradbury noted, he took a small liberty with history: Grant was actually at City Point, Virginia, that Christmas Eve, but he and the President remained in close communication, and "both of their futures depended upon word from Sherman."

The script also gave its name — "Hardscrabble" — to the first house Grant and his wife Julia built on the St. Louis property the play would later be performed upon. Bradbury wrote the piece as a tight one hour without intermission to fit the historic site's morning-and-afternoon scheduling, with the option to open with music when a longer evening was wanted. The companion Grant monologue One Last Ride: An Evening with General Grant shares the same world, letting Grant alone sift through "scraps of a life" — interviews, harness tack, and a lifetime of beloved horses.

Cast

Production Notes

The play was commissioned by the National Park Service and premiered at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site (Grant's Farm) in St. Louis, where it sold out both performances and was invited back for return engagements in December 2016. Bradbury both wrote and directed the production, drawing on a company of seasoned Springfield, Illinois actors: Fritz Klein, who has portrayed Lincoln in 38 states and in numerous documentary and feature films; Pam Brown, a longtime portrayer of Mary Todd Lincoln whose work has reached PBS and earned a Midwest Emmy nomination; and Dennis Rendleman, an attorney with the American Bar Association and a veteran of more than thirty-five stage productions, here playing Grant for the first time.

The play carried two titles across its productions — A Message at Midnight (or A Hardscrabble Christmas) — and was also slated for performances at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, the institution whose approved version Bradbury kept as the original script. Surviving correspondence captures Bradbury's spirited defense of that script against a venue's request for 109 line-by-line edits, insisting as both author and director that the play keep its "human" and humorous lines rather than become "a history lecture."