To celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of its Broadway debut in 1919, the Gettysburg Community Theatre is presenting John Drinkwater’s play “Abraham Lincoln.” The script and story definitely stand the test of time.
The play’s director, Dr. George Muschamp, is a veteran actor who has performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, on American Public Media’s “A Prairie Home Companion” radio variety show, as well as appearing in feature films from CBS, Disney, HBO, and Universal.
Muschamp who teaches at HACC Harrisburg, has delighted local audiences for decades with his directing and performing, and he shines in this chestnut.
The cast includes almost a dozen actors. First and foremost is D. Scott Hartwig, a retired National Park Service historian, who did an outstanding job playing Abe himself.
Historians do not agree exactly on how fervently Lincoln opposed slavery or how eagerly he may or may not have wished to ensure the total and absolute equality of Black Americans.
Drinkwater, a Londoner, tackled this story only fifty-four years after Lincoln’s assassination, and presents Lincoln in a golden light of heroic mythologizing.
Those familiar with the Steven Spielberg movie, “Lincoln,” written by the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Tony Kushner may remember that it paints Lincoln in a very folksy, homespun way, and highlights his somewhat reluctant path towards support of abolition, greatly influenced by Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens. This older script forgoes those nuances to present a somewhat saintlier Lincoln.
Hartwig brings such humanity—humility, warmth and humor—to the role that it’s easy to feel you are in the presence of the great man himself. He even lapses into more of a Southern dialect when Lincoln is alone with his wife or feeling weary—a brilliant detail.
The play begins in the Ford Theatre, where Abraham and his wife Mary, only five days after Lee’s surrender, have gone out on the town to celebrate the hard won peace by attending a play. It’s very poignant to sit watching them thoroughly enjoying a silly comedy, when we know full-well what’s to come. The story then flashes back five years to Lincoln’s accepting the nomination of the presidency and his first few days in office and continues forward until we end up again at Ford’s Theatre. Along the journey are elements of humor as well as sadness, including Mrs. Lincoln’s insistence that he get a better hat before becoming President, and President Lincoln’s own (authentic) remarks about his homely appearance.
Other stand-out performances include David Hurlbert and Michael Ausherman as two Southern lawmakers at odds with the President, Abby Armstrong as a very young soldier doomed to execution, and Delphine Pettway as the Reverend Custis, a fictional character believed to be a stand-in for the perspective of the great African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
In the 1919 Broadway premiere Custis was performed by Charles Gilpin, who in 1920 became the first African-American actor to receive the Drama League’s Annual Award given to the top ten people in the United States who have been deemed to have done the most for American theatre in that year. Gilpin, who performed regularly for the Lafayette Players of Harlem, also originated the role of Emperor Jones in O’Neill’s play of the same name, a role later taken on by the great Paul Robeson, after a 1925 falling out between Gilpin and O’Neill over O’Neill’s use of the “N-word” in the script.
But most striking about this telling of Lincoln’s story is the highlighting of the agonies of war. In many scenes, we see the price exacted on the president and on the nation. At one point, Lincoln agrees that war is wrong; however, he says that sadly, people are sometimes “clumsy, greedy pirates.”
What the playwright saw while writing this play in England of 1917 was his own country at war, a war that ultimately killed nine million soldiers and seven million civilians.
As a commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the British government commissioned a stage designer, Tom Piper, to create a memorial at the Tower of London. The work was entitled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” (the title was taken from the first line of a poem by an unknown soldier in World War I.). The installation, which took place at the Tower from July to November of 2014, consisted of 888,246 ceramic red poppies. Each flower represented a British or colonial soldier killed on the battlefield. I was fortunate to have been able to see the installation. Every day, more poppies were added to indicate the number of dead that day. It truly was a moving tribute and enabled me to begin to comprehend the enormous number of the dead.
Drinkwater’s play, like the World War I memorial, reminds us that, as President Carter once said, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”
This story of Lincoln trying to keep the Union together and abolish slavery against terrible odds is well worth seeing. If his efforts at Reconstruction, begun before the end of the war, had succeeded, one wonders what sort of world we’d be living in today.
The play continues next weekend: Friday, July 26 and Saturday, July 27 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 28 at 2 p.m.
For more information, visit https://www.gettysburgcommunitytheatre.org/.
Susan Russell is a Professor in the Theater Arts Department at Gettysburg College.