A Review
Old Story, Timely Play: Jordan's Stormy Banks
by Mary Sprunger
 In August 2002,
the play Jordan's Stormy Banks by Elizabeth Beachy debuted in
Harrisonburg, Virginia, treating residents and visitors of the
Shenandoah Valley to a story of tough choices and faithfulness
during a war that cut through families, farms, and congregations.
In the Midwest, the dramatic American Mennonite peace story revolves
around World War I and the experiences of conscientious objectors
in military camps and prisons. In Virginia, the pivotal experience
for Mennonites was the Civil War. The Shenandoah Valley was the
site of numerous battles as Confederate and Union troops marched
up and down the so-called "Valley Pike" (today U.S.
Highway 11 or Interstate 81). Mennonites and Brethren faced difficult
choices in the midst of war, such as how to vote in the 1861
statewide referendum on whether Virginia should secede from the
Union. Even more challenging and divisive was how to deal with
conscription into the Confederate army. Options included full
participation in the Confederate forces, joining the army but
refusing to use a weapon, or flight. A number of Mennonites and
Brethren tried to make their way through the mountains to West
Virginia (on the Union side) and then on to Pennsylvania. Some
were caught and imprisoned before they completed the thirty-mile
trip to safety. Elder John Kline, a vocal advocate for conscientious
objection, is revered today as a Brethren martyr because he was
murdered in 1864 for his challenges to Confederate conscription.
As agricultural producers in the breadbasket of the Confederacy,
Mennonites and Brethren were also on the receiving end of Union
General Sheridan's 1864 campaign of destruction, know locally
as "the Burning," that razed barns, mills, and crops.[1]
The new Valley Brethren-Mennonite Heritage Center, an emerging
joint venture between the two historic peace churches of the
Shenandoah Valley, commissioned Jordan's Stormy Banks. Only in
the last several decades have Mennonites and Brethren there started
to work together on various projects. This center represents
a major leap forward in that cooperation. The goal is a museum
that will interpret the beliefs, practices, and histories and
help to sharpen the identity of Virginia Mennonites and Brethren.
One hope is to contribute an alternative peace story to the Civil
War narrative so prominent in the Shenandoah Valley. Commissioning
the play was a way to publicize the purpose of the Heritage Center
and work at shaping the story. According to Al Keim, director
of the center, "We were amazed by the positive response
to the play. It seems to have met a need, a kind of definition
of what Mennonites and Brethren are and stand for."
Jordan's Stormy Banks is an impressive first-time effort for
playwright Beachy, an Eastern Mennonite University theater graduate
and master of fine arts student at Regent University in Virginia
Beach. The subject matter almost requires a predictable plot.
The drama centers around one family, the Showalters (intentionally
generic so that they could be either Mennonite or Brethren).
Conveniently, there are a variety of responses to military activity
embedded in this one family, which provides the dramatic tension.
Son Christian chooses to fight for the Confederacy, while his
brother Gabriel, a conscientious objector, is jailed for attempting
to flee north. Son-in-law Reuben Herr, married to daughter Edith,
dons a uniform but does not carry a weapon, and the love interest
of a younger sister makes it safely to Pennsylvania. The main
character is daughter Maria, played wonderfully by Kirsten Beachy
(sister of the playwright). A young widow and mother, Maria is
strong, brave, spirited, and resourceful. In one scene she serves
pie to Union soldiers, successfully distracting them from their
search for horses hidden on her farm. This scene is based loosely
on a story from Beachy's family. The play climaxes when Union
troops overrun the Valley: Reuben and Edith's farm is ransacked,
Maria is burned when her farm is set ablaze, and Christian faces
a showdown in the family kitchen with a Union soldier. Her play
captures well the complicated experience of Mennonites and Brethren
during the Civil War in a way that entertains, informs, and even
inspires.
Issues of community surface in the play. A busybody neighbor,
unsympathetic to nonresistance, added some tension and humor
to the plot, although the portrayal came across as a caricature.
Nevertheless, her neighborly intervention highlighted the relationship
to the local community during a time of war. Her suspicions of
disloyalty on the part of Mennonites and Brethren and the lack
of understanding for their pacifist position created hard feelings
and even pain between neighbors previously on good terms. The
importance of the other community in the play, the church, is
woven throughout the drama via a group of soberly dressed congregants
singing hymns off to one side of the stage. Appropriately, most
of the music comes from The Harmonia Sacra, a popular nineteenth-century
songbook published by Virginian Mennonite Joseph Funk, with some
new arrangements by musical director Matthew Hunsberger.
Beachy first began writing the play as a series of "loosely
connected vignettes" along the lines of Quilters. This has
been a form typical of early Mennonite drama in the early 1970s,
a style that tends to lessen the emotional impact on the audience.[2] Says Beachy,
"After I'd written a number of them, however, I started
to see that it needed more backbone, and began to string them
together using the family as the connecting link." The result
was something reminiscent of The Blowing and the Bending, written
in 1973 by James Juhnke and J. Harold Moyer, which Beachy has
never read nor seen. Written at the end of the Vietnam War era,
the play focused on a Kansas Mennonite farm family as it struggled
with threats from the community about not buying war bonds and
making difficult choices about how to respond to the draft. Their
German ancestry magnified the problems, as non-Mennonite neighbors
viewed them as disloyal to the United States.[3]
Mennonite drama commissioned by institutions, particularly that
from the 1960s and early 1970s, has been characterized as "literal,
didactic, self-congratulatory and uplifting."[4]
While perhaps necessarily somewhat didactic, Beachy's script
has moved beyond the purely self-congratulatory and uplifting
by introducing complexity and ambiguity into the play.
Directed by Paul Hildebrand (drama professor at Eastern Mennonite
University) and held at Court Square Theater in downtown Harrisonburg,
the show played to sell-out crowds, and extra performances had
to be added during the two-weekend run. Noticeably absent in
the audience, with only few exceptions, were the younger generations.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in our present
context of uncertainty and war, now is the time to expose Mennonite
and Brethren young people to stories of peace from their own
histories. This play was a good reminder of the hard choices
that members of historic peace churches have always faced when
their countries are at war. Especially relevant themes of the
play include the gray areas that arise when one's own farm and
home is being attacked; the community tensions that result when
some opt out of the typical patriotic response; and the bravery
and steadfastness of Mennonites and Brethren who remained true
to their understanding of Christian pacifism. Keim's assessment
of the play is that it "has a kind of universal quality
about it; the resolution of whether to enlist in the war or not
and the moral ambiguities connected with that decision is a timeless
question, present in any age, and there are no cookie-cutter
answers."
Since the debut production, Beachy has substantially rewritten
the play. There will be several chances to see the revised version
of the play in the summer of 2003, when Jordan's Stormy Banks
goes on tour to Harrisonburg, Virginia (June 6-8, 13-15); Lancaster,
Pennsylvania (June 19-22, 26-29); and Atlanta, Georgia, for the
Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly (July 3-7).
Mary Sprunger is associate professor of history at Eastern
Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, Virginia.
This article is published jointly with Mennonite Life, March
2003. See Mennonite Life at www..bethelks.edu/mennonitelife
Notes
1. For Mennonites and the Civil War,
see Samuel Horst, Mennonites and the Confederacy: A Study in
Civil War Pacifism (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1962); and
Jacob R. Hildebrand, A Mennonite Journal, 1862-1865: A Father's
Account of the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley, compiled by
John R. Hildebrand (Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1996).
2. Anna Juhnke, "North American
Mennonite Playwrights, 1980-1996," Mennonite Quarterly Review
71 (1997): 43-44.
3. For more on The Blowing and the Bending,
see Juhnke 54-55.
4. Paraphrase of Ervin Beck in Juhnke
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