Arizona Theatre Matters Education · Study Guide

Midnight at the Algorithm & Blues

History, performance, public memory, digital identity, satire, and what happens when the past refuses to behave like content.

At a Glance

Playwright: Gary Wright
Originally commissioned by: Arizona Theatre Matters
Form: dark comedy, supernatural satire, media satire, and historical fantasia
Setting: late at night inside the General Grant National Memorial in New York City
Central figures: Linzie, Boone, Clio/Julia Dent Grant, Robin, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Narrator
Suggested educational use: mature secondary students, college courses, theatre programs, public-history settings, media-literacy programs, and community discussion groups

Essential question: Who gets to decide what history means when memory, evidence, performance, branding, and audience demand all compete for control?

Content Note

The play contains strong language; sexual references; alcohol use; verbal, emotional, and physical abuse within an intimate relationship; coercive and manipulative behavior; references to religious control and cult-like upbringing; and historical discussion involving war, racism, slavery, and national conflict. Educators and facilitators should provide advance information and should not require participants to disclose personal experiences of abuse, religion, family conflict, or political belief.

About the Play

Linzie and Boone enter Grant’s Tomb after hours to record an episode of their faux-Christian ghost-hunting channel. Off camera, their marriage is volatile. On camera, they perform a wholesome version of themselves shaped by audience expectations, platform analytics, and the identity their subscribers have come to expect.

The performance begins to unravel when “Clio,” the Muse of History, intervenes. She refuses their easy version of Ulysses S. Grant, forbids editing, and forces the pair into a live encounter where performance and reality become increasingly difficult to separate.

By the time Clio reveals herself as Julia Dent Grant, the play has turned a ghost story into an argument about public memory. A National Park Service ranger arrives with another relationship to the site, and Grant himself eventually appears. The ending does not offer a final authorized version of history. Instead, even Grant gently corrects Julia’s storytelling while remembering the confusion and terror of war.

How the Play Works

Performance inside performance

Linzie and Boone are both characters and performers of invented online personas. The audience watches the gap between who they are and what they sell.

History becomes a character

Clio initially claims the authority of History itself, then reveals the personal point of view beneath that authority.

Editing is power

Boone depends on scripting, editing, branding, and analytics. When editing disappears, the rules of truth change.

Comedy carries conflict

Wordplay, profanity, slapstick consequences, and theatrical absurdity sit beside abuse, historical argument, and national memory.

A monument becomes a stage

The General Grant National Memorial is not just scenery. It is a place already designed to tell visitors what and whom a nation remembers.

The final correction never arrives

Julia corrects the influencers. Grant corrects Julia. The play keeps authority moving rather than giving one person the last word.

The Historical Ground Beneath the Comedy

The National Park Service identifies General Grant National Memorial as the final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union commanding general and 18th president of the United States, and his wife Julia Dent Grant. The present mausoleum was completed in 1897. Julia chose New York as Grant’s burial place in part because she wanted a place beside him. The NPS also documents Julia’s later role in preserving her husband’s public memory.

That commemorative story is only part of the record. NPS interpretation of Grant’s presidency emphasizes Reconstruction-era efforts to protect Black voting and civil rights and federal action against Ku Klux Klan violence. NPS interpretation also documents slavery at White Haven, the Dent family home where Julia grew up and where enslaved Black people labored. Grant himself owned William Jones for a period before formally freeing him in 1859.

Why this matters to the play: public memory is not the same thing as a single verdict. Historical inquiry can hold military leadership, presidential policy, family memory, slavery, racial violence, marriage, political mythmaking, and personal testimony in the same frame without pretending that one fact cancels every other fact.

Characters and Dramatic Functions

Linzie

Performer, skeptic, provocateur, and one half of the ghost-hunting team. Her on-camera identity and private voice are strikingly different.

Boone

Co-host, producer, brand manager, and spouse. He tries to control the plot, the image, the analytics, and often Linzie herself.

Clio / Julia

She enters under the authority of the Muse of History but ultimately reveals herself as Julia Dent Grant, a loving and highly interested witness.

Robin

An interpretive ranger connected to the memorial. Robin represents public history as lived work rather than supernatural authority.

Grant

The ghost of Ulysses S. Grant arrives late, complicating Julia’s corrections with memories and corrections of his own.

The Narrator

Creates the physical world, tracks theatrical action, and lets the production move between the crypt, the livestream, and the audience’s imagination.

Themes and Big Ideas

History versus content

Historical complexity is slow, inconvenient, and difficult to package. Content rewards clarity, identity, repetition, and audience recognition. The play turns that conflict into comedy.

Algorithms and performed identity

Linzie and Boone understand themselves through what performs well. Their channel does not merely distribute their personas; it helps create those personas.

Public memory and monuments

A monument makes an argument about significance before anyone says a word. The play asks what happens when later generations enter that argument with different evidence, motives, and needs.

Love, control, and performance

The couple’s marriage contains intimacy and harm, affection and manipulation. Their public performance of domestic harmony makes the gap between branding and lived experience especially sharp.

The problem of the authoritative narrator

Clio appears to be History itself. Julia is a wife defending someone she loved. Both identities contain knowledge, but neither is neutral.

National mythology

The play repeatedly toys with stories of unity, exceptionalism, division, and reunion. It treats those stories as theatrical constructions that can be invoked, challenged, parodied, or revised.

Correction without finality

One of the play’s slyest ideas is that fact-checking does not end interpretation. The correction itself still comes from somewhere.

The Digital Frame

The ghost-hunting channel gives the play a second audience inside the play: subscribers, commenters, and viewers whose reactions shape what Linzie and Boone think they should do next.

The script uses likes, subscriptions, watch time, comments, live chat, monetization, and editing as dramatic pressures. Students do not need to know a particular platform’s current rules to analyze the larger question: What happens when a measurable audience becomes part of the creative process?

For current platform research, YouTube’s own Help Center is the best place to verify monetization and Partner Program requirements, because thresholds and policies can change over time.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

What changes when Linzie and Boone turn the camera on?
Who has the most power in their relationship off camera? Does that change on camera?
Why does Clio insist that Episode 78 happen live and without editing?
Is Clio more trustworthy before or after we know she is Julia? Why?
What is the difference between correcting a false claim and controlling the narrative?
How does the memorial itself influence what the audience expects to believe about Grant?
Why does the play allow Grant to correct Julia near the end?
What does Robin know that the ghosts do not? What do the ghosts know that Robin does not?
How does comedy make the historical argument more possible, or more dangerous?
What kinds of behavior does an online audience reward in the play?
When does a persona become a trap?
What does the final image of the stage turning blue add to Grant’s story about war, profanity, and memory?

Vocabulary

Public memory: the stories, images, rituals, monuments, and interpretations through which communities remember the past.
Historiography: the study of how history is written, interpreted, and revised.
Primary source: material created during or close to the period being studied.
Commemoration: a public act or structure created to remember a person, event, or group.
Satire: a form that uses humor, exaggeration, irony, or absurdity to expose contradiction or criticize behavior and systems.
Allegory: a story in which characters or events may also operate as representations of broader ideas.
Livestream: media transmitted to an audience while it is being created rather than after editing.
Algorithm: a defined process for making decisions or producing results; on digital platforms, algorithmic systems can affect what content is recommended or surfaced.
Analytics: measurements used to describe audience behavior, such as views, watch time, retention, or subscriptions.
Interpretation: in public history, the work of helping visitors engage with the meanings and contexts of people, places, objects, and events.

Before, During, and After

Before

Visit the National Park Service page for General Grant National Memorial and list what the site chooses to foreground.
Read one page from the Library of Congress Ulysses S. Grant Papers or an NPS page about Julia Dent Grant.
Define the difference between a monument, a museum, a memorial, and a history book.
Discuss how editing can improve accuracy and how editing can also conceal information.

During

Track the difference between Linzie and Boone on camera and off camera.
Notice every moment when a character claims authority over history.
Track corrections. Who corrects whom, and what happens next?
Listen for moments when audience metrics become part of the characters’ decision-making.

After

Choose one historical claim from the play and verify it using at least two reliable sources.
Identify one moment where the play deliberately makes “History” theatrical.
Map the different audiences inside and outside the play.
Ask whether the play ends with a clearer history of Grant or with a clearer understanding of how history gets made.

Sources and Research Paths

Source note: The play freely mixes documented history, historical myth, comic invention, supernatural fantasy, and deliberately unreliable performance. Treating every line as a historical claim would miss the point. The productive question is often: What kind of statement is this, who is making it, and how would we verify it?

Continue Exploring

The companion Toolkit turns these questions into practical source-checking, performance, writing, media-literacy, public-history, and design activities.

Open the Toolkit → Open the Press Kit →