There’s a joke that goes, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
Which seems apropos, having just come from seeing “Better Angels,” a play about Mr. Lincoln, at the Colony Theatre in Burbank.
At this point, I think I’m pretty well-versed with Mr. Lincoln and his story. Above my desk at home I’ve got a miniature bust of that president, and throughout the house I’ve got countless biographies and studies of the man, and collections of his writing. I’ve been to his memorial several times, and I respectfully refrain from comparing other, lesser politicians to him, no matter how close they try to sidle during election campaigns, no matter which party they come from.
Still, this play tonight did just what you hope the theatre will do, every time you step inside one: it awoke me to the reality. There is Lincoln the monument, and there was Lincoln the man. In order to remove Lincoln from the reliquary, the playwright (Wayne Peter Liebman) arrives upon the device of a framing sequence concerning Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, as played by David Dean Bottrell. At the play’s beginning,we encounter an older Hay, serving as secretary of state in the early 1900’s during the administrations of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. This Hay now realizes that with Lincoln he was in the presence of greatness. The younger Hay, seen throughout most of the play, like so many other contemporaries mistakes Lincoln for a lucky and talentless buffoon. He, like the third character in the play, a female petitioner to the president, grow to understand his depth. And then, in the moment of his triumph, having won the Civil War and passage of the Thirteen Amendment, which abolished slavery, Lincoln suffers his tragic end. But this is offstage, and Hay, the older Hay, 40 years after the fact, one of the last few wh knew Lincoln personally, is the one to tell us, except he cannot fully tell us, his voice cracking as he says about that evening in the theatre, “You know the rest.” The moment was like a depth charge. Almost 150 years after the death of a man I never knew, I started to well up.
This was the second play I saw this week. The other, sadly, I didn’t like at all. I took a good friend with me and we spent the next day exchanging emails picking the play apart (and the direction). I could go on about why it didn’t work, but they’re the usual reasons: no real conflict, no real investment in the characters or the milieu, long and self-important monologues, late-arriving themes and complications. Rather than go on about that, I’d just like to say this: There’s a reason we’re drawn to art. Art is the expression of someone else who was here, someone who is connected to us, someone who left this trail. The cave paintings at Lascaux are the earliest and most vivid proof of this. In an age when we are bombarded by sensory overload and traffic jams of the freeway and of the mind, when a producer has to remind audience members before the performance that they can indeed forego Twitter and email for 90 minutes and to please do so, it’s art that has the power to reroot us in the ground we all stand on, the ground of our common humanity, and to remind us of its potential and its impossibility, its exultation and its awfulness. That’s what art is for.