Keep Up Good Courage

Keep Up Good Courage is a script taken from the letters of Civil War Soldiers from the Mad River Valley in Vermont. Based on Alice Evans book, Our Suffering Brave. It includes the character list, music that was used in its first staging at the Valley Players Theater in Waitsfield, Vermont in 2025.

The letter writers are Vermont's Union Soldiers writing home to their wives describing the battles, their living conditions and food or lack of, they have fought, the friends they have lost, asking about their children, and what is happening back home.

Alice Evans, an Ohio native, lived in ten communities in five states both south and north of the Mason-Dixon line before she settled in Vermont. For almost 30 years she has considered Waitsfield, Vermont as her adopted hometown. Evans holds a master's degree in teaching and a Ph.D. Her career spanned classroom teaching, school district administration, consultant to school boards and positions in two state agencies of education, culminating with service as Vermont's first director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program.While living in Connecticut she was elected to a term on a nonpartisan Representative Town Meeting. She participates in state and national-level organizations that seek appropriate disposal for nuclear waste and oppose any expansion of nuclear power plants. In 2017 she was convicted of trespassing on a Vermont site where a natural gas pipeline was being laid for the sole benefit of Canadian corporate consumers. She is active in CodePink, Indivisibles and several international anti-war groups.