White House Happening

Lincoln died last night. Mr. Kirstein, Director of the New York City Ballet and sometime poet, has written a new play about Abraham Lincoln that neither strikingly reinterprets history nor forcefully recreates it. And the deadness of the play's language and plot, the absence of mythic word and mythic act keep it a safe distance from being what its subtitle hopes, "a legend after Lincoln."

Mr. Kirstein has tried to stuff every bit of Lincolnian legend-fluff there is into the few hours before the President's trip to Ford theater. Ann Rutledge, William Herndon, Matthew Brady, Crazy Mary, Drunk Ulysses, dirty stories, trips down the Old Mississippi, unorthodox but deep faith, what he really felt about the Negroes and more and more. Since Kirstein's sole thread of dramatic coherence is Lincoln's growing consciousness that this day is the ordained and necessary day of death, the catalogue of anecdote and reference might be, lamely but legitimately, the drowning man's life passing before his eyes. But Kirstein's dramatic and literary skill isn't enough to carry it off. The scenes stand on stage until they wilt while the words waddle back and forth, nibbling at them.

The unfortunate thing about it all is that Mr. Kirstein, who staged the Loeb production himself, has played up his weaknesses by a kind of epileptic direction. The small cast goes through its paces in a formal, costumed, slightly stiff historical drama way, and there's a fit: John Braden's lights and set start playing discotheque games and some refugees from a mine troupe start fooling around on the White House lawn, carrying ghosts on poles and setting off sparklers. Then these people pack up and we're back to chamber drama.

These audio-visual flurries are imposed on the play and blow up any chance of dramatic development within scenes. They fragment the play and make it painfully obvious that the dialogue is also fragmented--little blips of exposition that are never again used, meaningless historical name-dropping. And the actual Lincoln speeches and quotes from Scripture that come from the loudspeakers when the play has one of its seizures make Kirstein's rhetoric look sick.

Kirstein has Elizabeth Keckley (Nancy McDaniel), the local White House witch accuse Lincoln of "playing with words." And Old Abe's bastard Negro son-valet interrupts Lincoln's speeches for definitions. Lincoln's two secretaries who will write histories talk about history. Characters repeat words for the sake of Meaning. "Till the day I die," says Abe. "The day you die?" say they. "The very day'" says Abe. O ominous, O morbid.

But all this swirling about of words and self-consciousness of diction is not backed by vital dialogue and stirring speech. Quotes from the Bible, Lincoln and Shakespeare steal the show through the force of clean language. All Kirstein leaves us is the vague impression that there is something semantic in the air.

A plotless show in dead voices doesn't leave performers much room. John Lithgow as Lincoln was the only member of the able cast called upon to act. His Lincoln had a frontier body and a lawyer's voice. The excessive makeup limited his face somewhat, but his Abe was a spark of life in a dead play. Kirstein, however, gave him nothing to live for so he went out and had himself shot.