Honest Abe of Oberammergau

There are two remarkable things about the revival of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, the 1939 Pulitzer prizewinner for best play that opened last week at New York City’s Lincoln Center. One is the curtain call, when the full cast of 49 actors crowds the stage, a stunning sight in these budget-conscious days of single-set, four- or five-character dramas. The other, even more startling, is the very fact that anyone would choose to bring this sprawling, earnest pageant back to Broadway. Rather than current theater, it resembles Oberammergau’s passion plays or those outdoor historical extravaganzas in the U.S. heartland that put a wig and costume on practically everyone in town.

Less remarkable, though full of courage and emotional range, is Sam Waterston’s portrayal of the backwoodsman turned reluctant candidate in a dozen scenes spanning a quarter-century, as Lincoln rises from law student to President-elect. He is the center of an impressive production of a once esteemed play that is now interesting chiefly as a barometer of how tastes, political mores and media behavior have changed.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois was one of three plays to win Pulitzer Prizes for author Robert E. Sherwood during a five-year span. (The others were Idiot’s Delight, a 1936 comedic outcry against the forces breeding World War II, and There Shall Be No Night, a 1940 tragedy about the invasion of Finland.) A commercial success, Abe Lincoln ran more than a year. For its time, an era of patriotic fervor verging on hagiography toward national leaders, it is daringly candid.

It portrays, if briefly and discreetly, the mental problems that beset Lincoln and his wife. It acknowledges their marital troubles. It describes Lincoln as lazy, lacking in ambition, needing prodding to seek office. It depicts him as ideologically cautious and passive, resistant to reform, hesitant even to take up the abolitionist cause against slavery. Sherwood was echoing the populist message of Frank Capra’s contemporaneous films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: the only hero to trust is one who doesn’t want the job. But Sherwood was also humanizing an outsize figure, pointing out that nobility does not require perfection and that anyone can grow better.

By the standards of today, however, when admiration is only a way station on the road to being debunked, this Lincoln is still a plaster saint. Moreover, his pivotal transformations take place offstage, or at least inside his head. He jilts Mary Todd because she is too ambitious, then after two years’ absence seeks her hand. It’s never clear why. As for abolition, he seemingly undergoes a quasi-religious conversion on the prairie, praying aloud for a friend’s dying child while the friend’s loyal servant — the one black in the 3 hr. 20 min. epic — fetches water. But Lincoln, who has sounded like an atheist until then, doesn’t explain what he felt.

Waterston struggles manfully to explicate this underwritten character, never more successfully than when he capers around the stage in delight at a couple of his own irreverent jokes. But it is a measure of how stately and hollow the enterprise is that the grandest moments are the scene changes, with their sweeping use of the wide stage, and the special effects of the finale, as a train pulls in to take Lincoln away to Washington, martyrdom and immortality.