Metro Theater Company productions almost always have an exciting theatricality about them, like the current Battledrum, which is playing at the Missouri History Museum in concert with their Civil War exhibition. Battledrum opens with Union soldiers hurling firebrands at a Confederate homestead in Kentucky in 1863. Director Carol North gives us quick images of men racing about, leaping over a split-rail fence placed cunningly by set designer Nicholas Kryah, while John Armstrong's lights and Rusty Wandall's sound give us flames and explosions. It happens fast – just long enough to pull us into the story, short enough that we don't have time to ponder that we're watching lights flash and hearing loud sounds, not someone's home and barns being destroyed.