Civil War Chronicles:
Cross Way Cross
Part I of Linda Mussmann’s The Civil War Chronicles, Cross Way Cross interweaved the historical travels of Abraham Lincoln with the adventures of a fictional “She” traveling along the Lincoln Dixie Highways to the town of Waycross, Georgia.
1987
Marymount Theater, NYC
written & directed by LINDA MUSSMANN
music composed/orchestrated by SEMIH FIRINCIOĞLU
performed by BRITT ARBELIUS, BRIGITTE BLEY-SWINSTON, CLAUDIA BRUCE, DENISE CRIDGE, JAIME EINBINDER, SUSANNE HELMES, VICTORIA KELLY, LAURA KOLB, and STEVE MALLARDI
orchestra: BEVERLY AU (cello), DÉSIRÉE ELSEVIER (viola), SEMIH FIRINCIOĞLU (accordion, piano), PAUL EVANS MITCHELL (acoustic bass)
technical assistance from Sophie Hawkes, Donna Janosik, David Kitazono, Mark Schuyler
“One cannot go forward without going back.”
Rebecca Schneider,
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment
“In Cross Way Cross, the woman ‘She’ is traveling south. The stage is the street – the road to Waycross, the ‘city of dreams.’ ‘She’ drives down the stage in a Lincoln continental (a large table center stage behind which she sits), listening and singing ‘The Radddioooo is [. . .] ON!’ While there is no mention of physical resemblance as the driving force behind her becoming Lincoln […], nevertheless she does become Lincoln himself in the course of the play, while simultaneously remaining ‘She.”
Linda Mussmann, in her notes accompanying the play’s publication in Women and Performance
“This production has to achieve a balance between a bad history-play and its parody, between a vaudevillian entertainment and a serious poetic lyricism, between being a contemplation on the passing of time and a reduction of historical chronology to simple, mechanical repetition. Although the structure is somewhat non-linear, the flow is based on formal juxtapositions and ‘cross-overs’ of separate lines (mainly of the travels of Lincoln with those of ‘She’).”
Jack Anderson, The New York Times:
“(Bruce’s) exuberant vocalisms and arm gestures beautifully conveyed the euphoria that motorists can feel when they are speeding along with their car radios booming… Then, metaphorically speaking, the past crashed into the present as the text mentioned a motorist who, to avoid a chicken crossing the road, accidentally hit a tree.”
