There are at least two pieces of American history colliding in Intiman’s earnest production of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”
The expected one, of course, is the path-to-greatness tale of the man who would become the 16th President of the United States, and leader through the bloody Civil War. Erik Lochtefeld ably portrays the growth of Lincoln from a stumbling, small-town failure with a love of words to an astute Springfield politician and unlikely savior of the nation.
The second, impossible to conceal, is the New Deal-era enthusiasms of Robert E. Sherwood’s 1938 play. Here, the rail-splitter Abe is a working-class hero, and the Great Emancipator was also a booster of the fledgling labor movement.
Such elements make the timely subject of Lincoln – both for the 200th anniversary of his birth and the frequent revival of his memory by our current president – feel dated. We go to be immersed in the Union of Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, but find ourselves marooned in the America of F.D.R.
Sherwood’s portrait of Lincoln is a familiar one, the self-doubting melancholy son of the frontier drawn by Carl Sandburg in his 1926 hagiography, “The Prairie Years.” Lochtefeld, who passably resembles Lincoln with his lanky frame, plumbs the young prairie lawyer’s bewilderment and uncertainty as he studies his letters by lamplight. In dirty bare feet, his hair a mass of cowlicks, he learns his oratory not through the Roman Cato but from his American equivalent, Daniel Webster, and on the subject of the right of states to secede.
What governs every moment is Sherwood’s view of Lincoln as a man of destiny, the honest yokel that inspires faith in those around him even as he is plagued with his own demons. Everyone around him, including his friend Joshua Speed (Hans Altwies), his mentor Judge Bowling Green (Allen Galli), and law partner William Herndon (Peter Dylan O’Connor), somehow recognize him as the man of the hour even as he cannot see it himself. We’re on Abe’s side, really, but Sherwood relies on our knowledge of how the story ends.
This Lincoln doesn’t just read “Hamlet,” he is America’s Hamlet, intellectual, indecisive and fleeing from his fate. Shaken by the loss of his young love Ann Rutledge (Angela DiMarco), it’s up to Mary Todd (Mary Jane Gibson) to recognize his inherent greatness and drive him to the pinnacle of power. Here too, Sherwood draws a blunt parallel as Lincoln, terrified of the providence Todd envisions for him, flees the altar into the prairie wilds to wrestle with his demons, just like Jesus in the desert.
Sherwood’s play, which won him one of the four Pulitzer prizes he earned in his career, is often seen as a piece of agitprop to spur U.S. entry into World War II, offering the kind of strong, reluctant and fatherly leader into war that Roosevelt would need to become. Sherwood himself had abandoned his earlier anti-war positions and would later be a speechwriter for F.D.R., then head of the Office of War Information.
To director Sheila Daniels’ credit, she neither ignores nor indulges Sherwood’s fixations. She merely presents them as they are in a production of frontier sparseness, with a cast that sings period folksongs to transition scenes. Given its overriding subject of African-Americans in bondage, however, this is not the play for color-blind casting, especially with the otherwise capable Reginald André Jackson as Lincoln’s powerful patron.
Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ set mimics that simplicity with a largely bare stage flanked by cabin-shack wings and a low wave of prairie grass behind. L.B. Morse’s lighting cunningly establishes the change of mood.
It’s in the later act that the Lincoln we know begins to emerge, and where Sherwood performs his most active cherry-picking of history. Stephen Douglas (R. Hamilton Wright), in their famous debates, counters the condition of the slaves with free labor sweatshops in New England, and Lincoln praises the right to strike. It’s verbatim text, but carefully selected. Sherwood also omits that Lincoln lost that election.
As the play concludes with Lincoln, now in his familiar whiskers, departing for the White House, one wonders what historical elements a contemporary Sherwood might choose. Would Lincoln’s opposition to the War with Mexico stand for the invasion of Iraq? Would his bouts of depression represent a cry for universal health care, or his Second Inaugural call for forgiveness be an appeal to modern bipartisanship?
Abraham Lincoln is certainly for the ages, but “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” hasn’t weathered time especially well. The prairie fire of the 1930s has banked too low.
“Abe Lincoln in Illinois” runs through Nov. 15 at Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street at Seattle Center. Tickets: $40-$55, $25 every Tuesday, $10 under 25; 206.269.1900 or www.intiman.org.
