MICRO-APARTMENT DESIGN WINNER ANNOUNCED
New Yorkers are used to living in tiny apartments, but the shoebox is about to get even smaller. Last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winners of the “My Micro NY” apartment design contest. The winning designs, by a team from Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corp. and nARCHITECTS, feature 9-to-10-foot ceilings and somewhere around 300 square feet of space. Almost half of the 55 micro-units, which will be built on East 27th Street, will be available at an affordable price.

“New York’s ability to adapt with changing times is what made us the world’s greatest city,” the mayor said when announcing the winner. “And it’s going to be what keeps us strong in the 21st century.”

The space includes ample storage, a tiny kitchen with a full-size fridge and a living/sleeping area. The building itself is a part of Bloomberg’s program adAPT NYC. Construction will begin in the fall.

EDUCATION 311 CALLS GETTING LOST
It is no secret that 311 calls get lost in the shuffle, even though the calls are supposed to be answered within seven days. But according to City Councilmember Gale Brewer, parental calls about schools have been re-routed to school networks instead of the superintendent. This makes many of the calls go largely unnoticed, she said in a letter to the Department of Education.
“Parents are desperate to have their questions answered,” Brewer said. But she also allowed that the 311 system might not be the most efficient place for school concerns; in her view, “311 is great for simple things and information,” not so great for more complicated educational questions.

SPEAKING OF LINCOLN
The New-York Historical Society presents a special historical treat. Watch the critically acclaimed movie Lincoln and then hear from the movie’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, (Angels in America), and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer (Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America). They will discuss the film’s treatment of our 16th president. Tickets are $35.

FIGHTING HEART DISEASE IN WOMEN
On Friday, Feb. 1, Lenox Hill Hospital is offering free screenings for cholesterol, blood pressure, calcium scores, glucose, BMI and vascular health. Visitors can also sample heart-healthy snacks and check out free yoga demonstrations. At the Einhorn Auditorium, 131 E. 76th St., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Photo by Carol Rosegg

The holiday season is often a time of reflection, but Paula Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of How I Learned to Drive, has squinted back a bit further in time than most. Vogel’s new work, A Civil War Christmas, currently staged in a resourceful and intermittently affecting New York Theater Workshop production by director Tina Landau, trains its eye nearly 150 years back on the final Christmas Eve seminal president Abraham Lincoln would ever see. It’s an over-long pop-up history lesson that absolutely has its heart in the right place but misjudges just when it comes time to take a bow.

Not exactly a musical yet not quite sturdy enough to qualify as a solid dramatic work, Christmas occurs on Christmas Eve, 1864. It is also the eve of emancipation and the end of the Civil War, though both remain a few weeks away from seeing the light of day. So, too, does Jessa (Sumaya Bouhbal) long to see daybreak. The young girl has been separated from her mother, Hannah (Amber Iman), an escaped slave on a sojourn to the White House. Meanwhile, Lincoln himself (a terrific Bob Stillman, hitting grace notes full of wry humor and humility) has managed to evade his bodyguards – despite an existing threat on his life – to grab the Christmas gifts he has left behind. Saddled with a sudden, rare sense of freedom in his solitude, he embarks on his own quest of self-discovery once he finds Jessa and makes it his mission to reunite her with Hannah.

While he is on his own, Lincoln isn’t alone in such a voyage. Vogel’s grand canvas also includes room for characters both historical and historically based. For instance, Landau’s nimble ensemble, bouncing around in multiple roles, essays real people like Ulysses S. Grant (Chris Henry) and Robert E. Lee (Sean Allan Krill, who also plays John Wilkes Booth), who each prove to be flawed, compromised leaders. One of the characters played by Alice Ripley (who even plays the very male Lewis Payne) is Mary Todd Lincoln, whose association with freed slave and seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (Karen Kandel) elevated the latter to great heights in the nation’s capital. But they also portray composite characters like Decatur Bronson (K. Todd Freeman), who has abandoned his service in charge of a regiment of black soldiers to work as a Union blacksmith at a Union Army supply depot. He has vowed vengeance on any Confederate soldiers he might encounter in return for the rebel kidnapping of his wife.

Unlike Keckley, however, Vogel hasn’t quite stitched together as seamless a work. The multiple threads she tries to interweave in Christmas sometimes clash. An encounter between a dying Jewish soldier (Jonathan-David) and poet Walt Whitman (Krill yet again) feels forced and haughty, and undercuts any growing affection characters like Bronson, Keckley, and Abraham Lincoln have earned. The playwright also forgets that less is more. She sometimes gets too mired in  details when Landau’s cast can actually fill in a lot of emotional resonance on their own (I’m thinking of some of the rather superficial scenes involving Mary Todd.) Landau does succeed in purveying handsomely evocative stagecraft; Scott Zielinski’s standout lighting design, Tony Leslie-James’ costumes, and James Schuette’s minimalist wood set all serve as a reminder of the everyday hardships with which even the most distinguished of 1860s America had to contend.

Vogel’s intentions are honorable. She wants to portray that people on both sides of the bloody battle were indeed people and had more in common as humans than they were divided by ideology. But the work, at two and a half hours, lumbers on longer than it should. When does Landau’s piece come together? In the Christmas’ musical numbers, a combination of holiday hymns, battle cries and spirituals, quite lovingly directed by Andrew Resnick. Only then does the large cast literally achieve a sense of harmony. One wishes that this feeling didn’t have to be interrupted so often. Then again, there’s a lesson in that as well.

A Civil War Christmas

New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street. Through Dec. 30. http://www.nytw.org/a_civil_war_christmas_lp.asp