Social battles of Civil War echo today’s tensions
This is not your typical Civil War epic. There are no bloody battles, no marches and no dramatized political fights over states’ rights. But the same economic, racial and gender-based tensions still come to a head in PBS’ new historical drama Mercy Street.
Loosely based on accounts from nurses and doctors, the sixpart series follows volunteer hospital staff, contraband slaves and freemen as they collide under the roof of the Mansion House, a makeshift hospital in the Union-occupied city of Alexandria, Va.
“It was just a great melting pot and a great crossroads in which we felt like we could tell a whole bunch of different stories that all connected and would make for a vibrant, full world,” says David Zabel ( ER), who wrote and executive-produced the series with Lisa Wolfinger as well as Ridley Scott and David Zucker of Scott Free Productions.
At the center of that warring world? Union nurse Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
Winstead says she was drawn to Mercy Street’s portrayal of the war’s unsung heroes: women. She points to the prevalence of female nurses at that time, noting that “all the nurses before that point had been men. This was kind of the first time that women went out there and said, ‘No, I’m going to be a part of this. I’m not just going to sit at home. There’s too many people out there dying, and we need all the help we can get,’ and they basically demanded to be a part of this war.”
In addition to fighting stonewalling by male superiors, Winstead’s Phinney also struggles to provide proper medical care in an under-resourced hospital, alongside civilian contract surgeon Jedediah Foster (Josh Radnor) and navigate ideological differences with staffers including Confeder- ate belle and volunteer nurse Emma Green (Hannah James).
Green and Phinney forge an alliance: “We (have) our differences and we contradict one another, but we’re also united because we work in the same hospital and are seeing the bloodshed and witnessing what our differences are doing to the world and to the men that we love,” James says.
It’s that complexity that made Radnor want to be a part of Mercy Street — a series that, he says, humanizes characters, even as they wrestle with hypocrisies. “If you really look internally, you’ll see (that) we’re all just a mass of contradictions,” he says.
Zabel says the current cultural climate also lends a modern sensibility to Mercy Street. “There’s a relationship between black and white and between North and South in this country that still feels like it’s embattled,” he says. “And all the tensions that are still alive today are things that our show tries to explore.”