Word: kirstein
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...