A New Act in Abraham Lincoln's Dramatic Life

Honest Abe sings!

It's too soon to know how much he dances, too, because Peter Kellogg and his writing partner, composer David Friedman, are still laying the narrative and melodic groundwork for "Lincoln in Love," a new musical based on the curious romance of the president-to-be and his future first lady, Mary Todd.

They've got a few numbers written, including "You're Going to Have to Find Another Bed," which revolves around the idea that Lincoln and his Springfield, Ill., roommate Joshua Speed shared a single one -- for economy's sake -- until marriageable Mary came along. The authors, slated to unveil the work at a reading at Ford's Theatre in May, want to fashion a Lincoln who's wittily self-analytical, in a fatalistic, Albert Brooksian sort of way.

"Theater is always about surprise," says Kellogg, the show's librettist and lyricist. "And so you go into the theater and find out Lincoln's a funny guy."

Where Lincoln is concerned, we are a people of eternally inquiring minds. No other bust in the gallery of commanders in chief beckons quite so demandingly, beseeches us to burrow into his psyche, to cuddle up to his mysteries, to puzzle out the man behind the policies and pronouncements and personality tics. He was a dreamer who still infects our dreams, a thinker whose thoughts continue to provoke, an executive whose decisions affect the very DNA of the country to this day.

Perhaps, too, because his writerly voice rings out so crisply across time, each generation feels an especially urgent need to make him its own, much as the nation's 44th president has sought to enshrine him, once more, as a model for conscience in leadership. And so, particularly in this bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth, reams of books are published and documentaries broadcast. And another cadre of lanky actors is growing out whiskers and being fitted for stovepipe hats.

No less a pop-cultural mandarin than Steven Spielberg has ventured into the arena, confiding to reporters of late that his long-gestating film project on the 16th president -- with a screenplay by Pulitzer-winning Tony Kushner, and Liam Neeson agreeing to play the marquee role -- might soon get underway.

More immediately, though, Lincoln is coming under a modern microscope on the Washington stage. To commemorate the reopening of Ford's Theatre after an 18-month, $25 million overhaul, the company has commissioned a sprawling new play about Lincoln in the White House that began performances Tuesday and has its official opening tonight. With the rather grave title of "The Heavens Are Hung in Black," the three-act drama by James Still focuses on eight months in 1862, when the president was struggling over the Emancipation Proclamation.

The play, directed by Stephen Rayne and featuring David Selby as Lincoln, dwells as much as anything on Lincoln's mettle: what he was enduring, privately as well as publicly, as the Civil War dragged on. "I wanted to tell the story of a great leader," Paul Tetreault, director of Ford's Theatre, says of the commission, conceived during George W. Bush's second term. "I thought: 'You know what? We have a deficit of leadership in this country.' So I said: 'I want to put a play on that shows what it is to be a leader, not faux leadership, not make-believe, but real, genuine, hard-core leadership."

As Kellogg and Friedman explore in their new musical -- loosely inspired by the 1939 film "Young Mr. Lincoln," starring a clean-shaven Henry Fonda -- artists are forever re-sculpting Lincoln to modern contours, remaking his legend and reasserting his relevance. Why not for our self-aware age a Lincoln of lighter moods, a wooer of women who can carry a tune and doesn't take himself too seriously? There is hard historical evidence, at least, of his wry side. "That's why people will relate," Kellogg says. "We can identify with someone who has flaws, who laughs at himself."

The theater, with connections to Lincoln's life both rewarding -- he was a lover of Shakespeare, particularly "Macbeth" -- and more ominous, has time and again sought to be a medium for the exploration of his biography and psychology. Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, author and co-chairman of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, thinks it's the powerful intermingling in his character of the enigmatic and the down-to-earth that keeps writers and audiences coming back.

"There is always that one reaches for things with Lincoln that one can't quite grasp, whether it's the early romances or his own mystical association with the Bible," says Holzer, who recently edited "The Lincoln Anthology," a 964-page collection of essays, poems and plays about Lincoln by everyone from Leo Tolstoy to E.L. Doctorow. "Yet at the same time, he's not elusive, like a king," Holzer adds. "He's the most accessible of all presidents, the quintessential common man. He is on the most common of coins and he sits on the pedestal in the grandest monument in the capital city."