Almost half of all U.S. Medal of Honor honorees served during the Civil War. It has been bestowed posthumously 621 times throughout history. Currently, only seventy-seven recipients are still living. In all ways they are the elite of the elite.
Adapting Larry Smith’s popular history of select recipients, Stephen Lang mounted a one-man tribute show that played off-Broadway, throughout America, and on military bases all over the world. Cross-cutting between several of Lang’s more notable command performances, director-editor Larry Brand shows the theater piece in its entirety while conveying its wider significance during a time of war and armed hostility in “Beyond Glory.”
Strictly speaking, Lang is kind of white-ish, but he plays two African Americans, one Asian American, and several working class white ethnic Americans, without any stilted awkwardness. After all, it would be un-American to exclude anyone on the basis of race. There is no question each recipient’s story merits inclusion. Of course, they all have the Medal of Honor to prove it.
