The Women’s Faculty Club learned about the Southern battle reenactment subculture at their luncheon Monday.
The Club attended a speech by Patrick Bynane, theater instructor at BRCC, who discussed the theatrical elements of the Reilley Theater’s upcoming play, “Shiloh Rules.” Bynane focused on the origin of battle reenactments and how women are participating more in Civil War reenactments around the country, particularly in the South.
“Shiloh Rules” was written by Doris Baizely and debuted at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2001. Staged in the present time, the play is about four women who compete to create an authentic reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh, where in 1862, Confederate soldiers surprised Union troops in a two-day battle. Two women represent the Union army, and two women are in the Confederate army.
Set in a national park at the original battle site, the reenactors become so involved in the mock battle that they forget their real lives and become immersed in their characters.
“It’s a reenactment, yet people are so invested in it that they act like it’s real,” said Faculty Club Vice President Karen Powell. “They are so into the character that it’s like they are really bringing water to dying soldiers and trying to steal medical supplies from the federal army even though the Confederate army is supposed to lose.”
“Shiloh Rules” explores the obsession that some people have, totally taking on a role as if they are actually living it, not simply reenacting a historical event, Powell said.
Bynane emphasized the irony in this behavior, which is exemplified when the women forego the actual outcome of the past and try to sabotage each other’s battle strategies even though the battle has a definite outcome.
“In a metatheatrical moment, a play is making a comment about the very nature of theater and performers themselves,” Bynane said. “Characters are doing more than playing characters, they are forgetting who they really are.”
Bynane, who received his doctorate in theater history from LSU in 2002, explored the development of the Southern mindset after the war ended. Though people were at first reluctant to dwell on the past, reenactments of the battles of the Civil War began in the 1960s and 1970s as a cultural form of expression and rememberance, Bynane said.
Immediately after the war ended, the federal government turned battlefields into protected areas for historical preservation, but the South “wanted to put the past behind,” Bynane said.
“After the war ended, it was the women of the South who first sponsored and pushed for commemorative memorials and funds,” Bynane said.
Reenactments, mostly male-dominated, began in the South as a way to trace geneologies and as a memorial to the war, Bynane said. The reenactments did not become widespread until the 1960s and 1970s, well after the Civil War and its aftermath.
“In the last 10 years, reenactments have become much more co-ed,” Bynane said. Scholarship of not only battle tactics but the way of life has resulted in more interest.
He said people participate in the reenactments for a number of reasons, such as nostalgia for the past, guilt over living a privileged “soft” life, to experience Civil War life, and to “right the wrongs and even the odds” caused by the South losing the war.
“People wanted to experience what the soldiers experienced — what it was like to wake up at 5 a.m. and walk five-to-10 miles in a scratchy wool suit,” Bynane said.
Bynane also investigated the structural similarities between the play and the actual battle.
In the real battle, soldiers were surprised by the intensity of anger and violence that caused more Americans to die than all other American involvements before the battle of Shiloh. In “Shiloh Rules,” the reenactors discover the potential for violence and do more than “put on a persona,”– they take on the antagonistic attitude of soldiers at war, Bynane said.