by senior contributor Brendan Kownacki
Photo credit: Brendan Kownacki
“These were real women; strong women; feisty women, really going out there into a man’s world,” said Lisa Wolfinger, Executive Producer of the new PBS miniseries Mercy Street about the real life inspirations that inspired her characters. Wolfinger said that she knew that she wanted to tackle a story set in the civil war and when she came upon the story of Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria Virginia, she knew she had found her muse. The locale offered up a mixing pot of perspectives—Alexandria being a Union occupied Southern city for the entire war, and thus you had a mix of North and South to clash regularly. Wolfinger pointed out that the stories of nurses coming out of the onetime luxury residence turned infirmary gave the perfect backdrop for something that could be one part M*A*S*H and one part Ken Burns history epic.
Hannah James, Tara Summer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
The story of Mercy Street takes place in 1862 and follows the lives of two nurses in Alexandria who find themselves on opposite sides of the war; Mary Phinney, (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a stubborn New England abolitionist, and Emma Green, (played by Hannah James), a Southern belle who is flirtatious and gentle but grows in her beliefs as the story goes on. Joining the duo is Anne Hastings (played by Tara Summers), an experienced English nurse who finds herself set between the other two women and facing very human struggles with the personalities of others since she is an outsider without a ‘horse in the race’ of the war.
Executive Producers David Zucker and Lisa Wolfinger, Tara Summers, Hannah James, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
“What we were all trying to do was get it right and get the diction and the accents correct but not keep the audience away from it by going too far,” said Mary Elizabeth Winstead of the cast’s approach to the series. She emphasized that they didn’t want this to become a “stuffy costume drama where you can’t relate to the characters.” Hannah James agreed, and said there was “no stone unturned for us” in exploring the history of the story in order to make it as accurate as possible. James noted historians that were accessible to the cast before filming as well as on the set to help the narrative stay true to form. Tara Summers called it a “win-win” for her on approaching her role; to “be an English person in an American period drama” let her explore one of her favorite eras; she says she has seen Gone with the Wind more than one hundred times, so to step into the era was special.
Wolfinger noted that when searching for inspiration for the story, she read a number of memoirs from the first nurse volunteers in the civil war, including Louisa May Alcott, who many know of as the author of Little Women, but she was also a nurse in the Washington DC area during the war and penned a memoir about her time that Wolfinger said made her laugh and cry thinking about the story.
Tara Summers
Filming of the series took place over three months in the Richmond and Petersburg areas of Virginia. Richmond of course, was the Confederate capital so there is a bit of irony about building a Union occupied cityscape for a civil war reenactment in a place that was anything but. The actresses said the area was “steeped in history” and some even said they thought they saw ghosts in the building that set in for Mansion House Hospital. Tara Summers said it “gave [her] the willies” but overall the setting served as a positive influence on their character development.
Hannah James and Mary Elizabeth Winstead
The trio of actresses and their producers gathered for a special screening of the first installment of the series in Alexandria, VA (where else?) at an event sponsored by the Alexandria Film Festival and the Visit Alexandria program. While in town, the group explored the modern day remnants of the geography they portrayed and soaked in the history of the area.
David Zucker and Lisa Wolfinger
History is a critical aspect of the story that is both fact and fiction. “History matters,” said Executive Producer David Zucker about the way the past melds into the first American drama to air on PBS in more than a decade. Zucker says his hope is that “it can be incredibly dramatic, it can be comedic, it can be relatable and it can be relevant to our lives today.”
Take a look at the Cast and Crew of Mercy Street talk about the series, its development and how they felt about their characters:
