A braham Lincoln is one of America's secular saints, but Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a peculiar hagiography: It knocks him off his plinth until the final moments of the final scene, when it quickly sets him back up where we're used to seeing him. Written in 1938 by Robert E. Sherwood (six feet eight; film critic for Vanity Fair; member of the Algonquin Round Table), it tells a rags-to-glory story that must've been powerfully attractive to Americans at the tail end of the Great Depression: In 1939, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The following year, it was made into a film. It was adapted for television five times between 1945 and 1964. Then, in 1994, a production at Lincoln Center starring Sam Waterston won Drama Desk and Tony awards for best revival of an old play.
The script might owe some of its popularity to the ease with which it lets us identify with the Great Emancipator. Young Abe is a little lazy, a little unlucky, and a little depressed. He's shy around pretty ladies and unsure of himself in general—but who isn't? And if there's a little of us in Abe Lincoln, might there be a little Lincoln in all of us? That's questionable history (and terrible math) but clever drama.
Lincoln begins the play as a kind of grown-up Huckleberry Finn, sitting in his tutor's house with suspenders and mussed hair, receiving a late-night grammar lesson. His feet are bare and sooty, his rifle is within grabbing distance, and he plants his face on the table in exhaustion and frustration. "The moods," his tutor, Mentor Graham, intones. "Every one of us has many moods. You yourself have more than your share of them, Abe. They express the various aspects of your character. So it is with the English language—and you must try to consider this language as if it were a living person. Name me the five moods."
Sherwood launches directly—and shamelessly—into exposition via the indicative, the imperative, the potential, the subjunctive, and the infinitive. Lincoln is in debt, working at a flailing store with a drunken business partner, and feels a little lonely. ("The indicative mood is the easy one. It just indicates a thing—like," Abe gazes wistfully into the middle distance, "'He loves.' 'He is loved.'") He is at loose ends and fantasizes about adventure in the Western territories, but he isn't overly ambitious—his friends have to be ambitious for him. They are wrangling him a job as town postmaster, Lincoln laments, "Thinking that maybe I can handle that, since there's only one mail comes in a week."
And so it goes for the next three acts, Lincoln shuffling along all gloomy and humble while friends and admirers nudge him from jes'-folks postmaster to president. Though nearly three hours long, Abe Lincoln in Illinois doesn't contain a single digression. Sherwood's script is a funnel: He leverages every character, every line toward the fate we know is coming. Lincoln waxes morbid over the Keats poem "On Death": "'Can death be sleep when life is but a dream?'... That's good, Mentor. It's fine!" Lincoln demonstrates his Union-preserving mix of tough-guy posturing and witty diplomacy when he saves a fancy politician from a beat-down by local yokels. Lincoln's ambivalence about marrying Mary Todd becomes an opportunity—or, less charitably, an attenuated excuse—to explore Lincoln's commitment issues regarding abolition.
This would become tedious after a while, but the 19-member ensemble (some excellent Seattle actors, culled by director Sheila Daniels) keeps the sap running.
Hans Altwies as Josh Speed, Lincoln's friend and provocateur, lights up the stage with physical and vocal vigor. He is the animus behind Lincoln's prodigious, if dawdling, brains. Mary Jane Gibson brings wince-inducing comic relief as the ambitious and occasionally hysterical Mary Todd Lincoln. She bustles around the stage in her hoop skirt and curls, fretting over her husband's dirty boots and casual manners. (Lincoln used to joke that the Todd family was so fancy, they needed two d's in their name—even though one was enough for God.) And Peter Dylan O'Connor gives a marvelously easy and mercurial performance as the fiery, and occasionally tipsy, abolitionist William Herndon.
Erik Lochtefeld (one of the few out-of-towners) plays Lincoln as a mix of folksy, wide-eyed credulity punctuated with moments of surprising shrewdness. That was how his detractors described him, and Lochtefeld sometimes tips the scales toward the cartoonish vision of "Lincoln the rail-splitter."
But perhaps after Lincoln's co-optation by the Obama campaign, we need reminding that Abe was a tough guy, a rural sumbitch who worked as a soldier, barkeep, and railroad worker. The Obama image-makers, for a variety of smart political and social reasons, emphasized Lincoln the Dignified Leader and obscured Lincoln the Brawny Beefcake. But the popular image of Lincoln used to be more butch, closer to Carl Sandburg's The Prairie Years and Norman Rockwell's 1965 portrait (which Intiman is using for its poster and program art). This Lincoln has a book in hand, but he's out in the woods with his hand-hewn cabin behind him, carrying a big ax for manful smashing and a plumb bob for stoic equilibrium.
Lincoln used to be a dude. And Intiman's production—a little sprawling, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes goofy—reminds us that some dudes have greatness thrust upon them. 
