Young, Dumb, and Full of Glum

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.