A Special Delivery, Las Vegas Sun, August 23, 1996

0 A special delivery Lisa Sciortino Friday, Aug. 23, 1996 | 11:59 a.m. They had been stuck in a trunk for countless years: A stack of old letters addressed to a Civil War bride named Emma who had long since passed on. Gone, too, were the people who penned them: A cousin writing to pass along the latest county gossip; a grieving young widow; a father offering advice on how to be a good wife. But a century later, Rhonda Carlson was able to breathe life back into them. The letters and their authors are the foundation of "Dear Emma," the musical Carlson, a music teacher at The Meadows School, composed 14 years ago. The play, which has been performed in Boston and Los Angeles, was met with rave reviews here last year and is making two encore performances at the Clark County Theater on Saturday. The letters were forwarded to Carlson, 43, by relatives in Oklahoma. When they arrived, she was on a sabbatical from teaching music at the University of Southern Maine. Come to find out, Emma Dillon was a distant relative of hers who had lived in Floyd County, Va. The young woman had married a Yankee soldier shortly before the outbreak of the war and moved north with him. The letters were written by her family and friends. "I got so acquainted with these people," Carlson recalls. "Then it dawned on me that they had been dead for a hundred years." What hooked her was "the deep feeling they spoke with in the letters. That was the only way they had to communicate, probably, so they just poured it all out in a letter." That raw emotion, Carlson says, naturally lent itself to a theatrical piece, and she soon got to work transforming the letters into play form. "I did my best to stay true to the letter writers, but I reorganized the letters to really tell their stories." Music of the period is "interwoven" and "underscores the letters, which gives them a more heightened feel," she says. "The songs either express their inner feelings or they're sung like they would have been in their own environment. "It was a very moving, very important time in our history as a country. Here's this little pocket of people that are affected by this huge war. It's sort of a way of studying history from the inside out." One character is a young woman who loathed the poverty she lived in during the Reconstruction. "But by the end of her life, she had married a very wealthy captain and moved north," she says. "Other letters indicate she had taken to tonic (drinking) to relieve her melancholy. "I always feel like I'm in an Indian burial ground when I bring them back to life," she says of the characters. Audiences are equally as moved by "Dear Emma." "We realize that human feelings and problems and dilemmas are the same now as they were then," Carlson explains. "Parents worried about their children, they miss them, they conflict with them. "The poignancy of this period is you couldn't pick up a phone and call and say, 'Are you OK?' you might get a letter ... (and) realize that the news from home is just as sad as it is from the war front." Carlson has directed several other local theater productions such as the Actor Repertory Theatre's "Annie," New West's "Damn Yankees" and "The Music Man" at the Community College of Southern Nevada. archive