Arizona Theatre Matters
Great Divide Study Guide
A study guide for audiences, students, educators, and community groups preparing to experience Great Divide: A Clara Barton Story, a theatrical exploration of memory, mercy, service, nationhood, and the uneasy work of holding a broken country together.
On This Page
About the Production
Great Divide: A Clara Barton Story is a theatrical meditation on Clara Barton’s life, work, and moral vision. Rather than presenting history as a neat biography, the play moves through memory, image, and witness. Clara speaks from inside the urgency of care, while a Narrator frames her story through recurring river imagery, objects, and the figure of a girl living at a divide.
The result is not just a portrait of one historical woman. It is also a play about America itself: its violence, its fractures, its disasters, its unfinished promises, and its recurring need for people willing to show up when institutions are not ready.
Clara Barton appears here not as a marble monument, but as a working human being: sharp, funny, furious, exhausted, practical, unsentimental, and unwilling to stop. The script follows her from childhood experience with injury and caregiving through teaching, Civil War battlefield relief, the search for missing soldiers, the founding of the American Red Cross, and the late reckoning with what service costs.
Big Ideas to Listen For
What is the “great divide”?
The divide is geographic, political, emotional, historical, and moral. It exists in the nation, in the river imagery, and in the spaces between people who do or do not choose care.
What does Clara actually do?
Clara is not romanticized as an abstract angel. She carries, counts, writes, stitches, witnesses, organizes, and stays.
What does America remember — and forget?
The play is full of names, objects, lists, bones, letters, and fragments. It asks what a nation leaves behind and who is forced to carry the memory.
Can mercy cross sides?
Clara treats Union and Confederate bodies alike. The play asks what happens when a person refuses to let loyalty override humanity.
Why the recurring girl by the river?
The river imagery transforms private memory into a national metaphor. The girl, the river, and America begin to echo one another.
What does it mean to keep count?
In this play, counting is not bureaucratic. It is ethical. To count the missing, the dead, the wounded, and the living is to insist they mattered.
Context and Background
Clara Barton is remembered historically for her Civil War relief work, her efforts to identify missing soldiers, and her role in founding the American Red Cross. This play places those historical realities inside a poetic and theatrical structure that connects battlefield medicine, education, disaster relief, recordkeeping, and national identity.
The Civil War is central to the play, but the script is not only about war. It is also about the systems that fail before, during, and after crisis. Schools dismiss women’s authority. Governments are unprepared. Military systems leave the wounded and missing unnamed. Disaster arrives faster than bureaucracy can respond.
Against that backdrop, Clara becomes a figure of action. She is not powerful because she commands armies. She is powerful because she refuses disappearance: of bodies, of names, of the wounded, of the dead, of the work itself.
Why this matters now
The play speaks directly to current questions about disaster response, public service, national division, and the difference between patriotic language and actual care.
Why the river matters
The river is not just scenery. It becomes a metaphor for America: carrying, erasing, returning, dividing, and depositing what others would rather not face.
Synopsis
The play begins with a recurring dream: a girl by an American river. Through the Narrator’s imagery and Clara’s voice, the story moves between childhood and national allegory. A basket of objects collected from the riverbank becomes a record of what floods leave behind: spoons, buttons, bones, cloth, letters, mirrors, and fragments that demand naming.
Clara recalls the injury of her brother David and the care she gave him, framing that moment as her first real experience with bodily crisis, endurance, and responsibility. She then moves into teaching, where she learns that institution-building and service are also battlefields, especially when authority is handed to men by default and women are expected to step aside.
As the Civil War erupts, Clara enters scenes of transport stations, field hospitals, and battlefields. She tends the wounded, improvises supplies, writes names, and serves both Union and Confederate soldiers. Antietam becomes one of the play’s central points of reckoning, where care and horror become inseparable.
Later, Clara establishes the Office of Missing Soldiers, turning grief into ledgers, correspondence, and identification work. She carries this ethic forward into the founding of the American Red Cross, insisting that disaster relief must not wait for formal war. The play closes by returning to the river, the girl, the basket, and the image of a country still trying to become itself.
Key Characters and Images
Clara Barton
Fierce, practical, unsentimental, and relentless. She is not presented as a saintly abstraction, but as a person who keeps working when others stop.
The Narrator
A framing voice who links Clara’s life to the larger American landscape through images of rivers, baskets, bones, cloth, and return.
The Girl by the River
A recurring image rather than a separate realistic character. She becomes a vessel for memory, witness, America, and childhood perception.
The Basket
A container of found objects and unresolved history. It gathers what floods and wars leave behind and becomes a symbol of carrying memory.
The Wounded and Missing
Not one character, but a collective presence throughout the play. Their names, bodies, and absences shape Clara’s work and moral vision.
The River
A living metaphor for America itself: beautiful, dangerous, indifferent, and full of what it refuses to keep buried.
Themes and Big Ideas
Mercy as Action
In this play, mercy is never vague. It is practical, physical, repetitive work: carrying, washing, stitching, recording, feeding, identifying, and staying.
America as Wound and River
The script repeatedly links the nation to the river: carrying away homes and bodies, returning fragments, ignoring sides, and refusing tidy borders.
Witness and Recordkeeping
Clara’s ledgers, names, lists, and letters make clear that documentation is not neutral. To record someone is to refuse their erasure.
Women’s Labor and Authority
Clara is repeatedly underestimated, replaced, or doubted, yet the play shows that institutions often depend on the labor of women they refuse to fully honor.
Division and Human Need
The war divides blue from gray, but the play insists that bodies do not care about ideology when they are bleeding, starving, or dying.
Objects as Moral Memory
Buttons, bones, aprons, mirrors, letters, and shoes become more than things. They are remnants of lives and proof that something happened here.
Endurance Without Romance
Clara is not glamorized as untouched heroism. The play allows fatigue, disgust, rage, humor, pain, and bodily strain to remain visible.
Vocabulary
- Campaign: A military operation or series of actions in war; Clara also uses the word metaphorically for her caregiving work.
- Ledger: A book for recording names, data, and accounts.
- Tourniquet: A device or strip used to slow severe bleeding.
- Chloroform: A chemical once used as an anesthetic.
- Quartermaster: A military officer responsible for supplies.
- Relief work: Organized aid during disaster, war, or crisis.
- Andersonville: A Confederate prisoner-of-war camp known for catastrophic suffering and death.
- Geneva Convention / Red Cross principle: The idea that aid should be given without choosing sides in human suffering.
Before You Experience the Production
- What does it mean to care for people without asking which “side” they are on?
- Who usually gets remembered in stories about war, and who gets left out?
- How can objects hold memory or history?
- What responsibilities does a nation have to the wounded, the missing, and the dead?
- What is the difference between patriotic language and actual service?
During the Experience
- Notice how the Narrator’s river imagery changes your understanding of Clara’s story.
- Pay attention to the recurring objects: the basket, the bones, the button, the letter, the mirror, the apron, the shoes.
- Listen for when Clara’s language becomes wry or funny. What does humor do in the middle of horror?
- Consider how the play connects personal labor to national history.
- Notice when Clara is counting, naming, listing, or inventorying. What kind of moral action is that?
- Pay attention to how the play moves between child, woman, river, and country as overlapping images.
After You Experience the Production
- How did the river imagery shape your understanding of America in the play?
- What did the basket come to represent by the end?
- How does the play complicate traditional heroic stories about Clara Barton?
- What did the script suggest about memory, grief, and national responsibility?
- Did Clara seem more like a nurse, organizer, witness, archivist, or nation-builder — or all of them?
- What stayed with you most strongly: a line, an object, a sound, an image, or a silence?
Activities and Writing Prompts
Quick Reflection
Write for five minutes about one object in the play that felt especially charged with meaning. Why did it matter?
Discussion Activity
Discuss the statement: Clara Barton’s work is not about heroism first. It is about refusing disappearance.
Map of Mercy
Make a list of the different kinds of work Clara does in the play: physical, emotional, logistical, bureaucratic, and symbolic. Then discuss why all of those forms of labor matter.
Creative Writing Prompt
Write a short monologue from the perspective of one of the objects in the basket. What has it witnessed? What does it remember that people tried not to see?
Research Extension
Research Clara Barton’s work with missing soldiers or the founding of the American Red Cross. Then compare the historical record with the emotional and symbolic choices of the play.
Performance Activity
Choose a simple repeated action — folding cloth, counting names, washing hands, carrying water — and explore how it changes meaning when placed inside different emotional contexts.
About Arizona Theatre Matters
Arizona Theatre Matters is a theatre company building universally accessible work from the ground up. Through performance, education, sound, history, and storytelling, the company creates engaging, thoughtful experiences that invite audiences into theatre in inclusive and imaginative ways.
This guide is designed to support classroom conversation, community engagement, and deeper reflection before and after experiencing the production.