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Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Widow Lincoln Interview 20150208

history book shelf with the best-known history writers. the president's, looking at the policies of the commanders in chief. >> top college professor delving into the past. and real america featuring are keisel government and films from the 1930's through the 1970. c-span tv funded by your local cable or satellite provider. >> american history tv visited ford's theater in washington, d.c. where on the night of april 14th, 1865, abraham lincoln was mortally wounded as he sat in the presidential box with his wife watching a popular comedy. he died the next morning. we sat down with james still and mary bacon to talk about ford's production of the widow lincoln, commissioned to mark president lincoln's assassination about 150 years ago. this is about 30 men's. >> we are at ford's theater with james still and mary bacon about the play, the widow lincoln. i want to start with you mary. what is it like to produce aling-centered play in ford theater with that flag-draped box? what is that experience like? >> well, it is definitely -- what is the word? you are very aware of it. i am very aware of it. the first time i stepped into the theater, i was like whoa. then i was like why is there a picture of president washington up there? i don't know a lot of the specific history of the theater. through my research to do the role. also i have to say for me, i've thought a lot about how we turn a place into a sideline -- shrine because we know what happened there. but there are a lot of places where we just don't know what happened there. so it is a mixed thing. james has a line in the play, and a lot of lines from his play come to me. god gives us our beloved ones we make them our idols and then they are taken from us. i think about that. when i look at the fox, i think about making him an idol. he is a great idol. it is just that we have participated in that veneration , if that makes any sense. >> james you have worked with the theater for a while now so you are accustomed to it to a degree. but does it ever really leave you, being near that box? >> no. i didn't know coming back this time if i would have that same kind of haunted feeling being in the theater and sitting there. but in this case the widow lincoln actually incorporates ford's theater into the play. so there is sort of a double experience going on. you are watching mary lincoln remembering that night in ford's theater, and we are in the audience remembering that night with her in ford's theater. that is a very unique disappearance for me as a writer. i think sometimes at ford's theater, if i can speak for them they have to almost deny the box in a way. if you are doing a play that has nothing to do with lincoln, and yet you can't cover it up. you can't not light it. it is there and always present. so i would say in the widow lincoln what is wonderful and difficult in a certain way is that it is meant to be present. it is meant to be part of the play. and so i think sitting in the audience realizing there was a night on april 14th in 1865 that a president and his wife sat in that box and were watching a play just like we are going to be watching a play and this terrible thing happened. that still moves me. i have to say i am still moved by that. >> this play was commissioned for the 150th anniversary. is there any additional .iansy because of the -- poignancy because of the anniversary? >> sure. i had written another play about abraham lincoln set in 1862, the year he wrote the emancipation proclamation. i had always thought there was a second part to that play. not a sequel, but probably that i was not finished yet with the lincoln story. but i didn't really know what that was. when ford's came to me and suggested to write a play for the 150th anniversary i balked a little bit because i feel like i had written my abraham lincoln play. i also thought well, we all know the ending. we all know what happened. there is drama in that. we know the president was shot. we know that he died the next morning across the street and we know that the country went into mourning. but in that earlier play and in my research in that time, i had really become -- i guess i will say attached to m amp ry lincoln, and curious about her, and curious about the ways that she had been maligned for so many years. people are so passionately opinion eighted even now, 150 years later. so i approached them that i had a slightly different idea, which was to focus on marsh ry, and that president lincoln himself would not really be a character. he looms large in the play. his absence i would say looms large. but it is really about mary. so the poignancy of that, what was that experience for mary lincoln. it is important, the 150th anniversary. >> would you explain the basic premise of the play? can you tell us what the play is all about so people are understand what we are talking about? >> the play is about the period of time that mary lincoln spent in the white house right after he was shot. she holed herself up in a room that she had spent barely any team in for close to six weeks, 40 days, and would not leave even though johnson was ready to move in with his family and start running the country from the white house. that is how she dealt with her grief. that is what it is about. everything that is happening in the country while she is there. i guess it is about a woman's insistence on mourning in her own way. >> did the ford's people immediately like the idea when you said there will be no lincoln in the anniversary play? >> to the producer's credit i would say he took about one second and said yeah, we will do that. they know my work very well, and they know how seriously i approach the subject. and i think that paul and his colleagues were taken by the mystery of this. it is really an untold story. there is very little written about it. it was really a footnote in a book an arm or something. i thought surely someone has written extensively about that time. the one reason is we know very little about it. mary wrote about it in only one letter. she doesn't talk about it in detail. her dress maker, elizabeth keckley, who was her companion during that time talks about it a little in her book. but that's it. you can imagine, for me as a dramatist it was different. >> does the room she holed up in still there in the white house? >> that is a good question. in some way i am sure it exists. after the president died, she wouldn't go into any of the rooms where she had any associated memories. her own bedroom, any of the rooms. she found herself in this particular room, which was a small room in the living quarter on the second player that had been appointed to be sort of a writing room for lincoln for the summer. she went in and wouldn't leave. >> before we get to that part of the story, isn't it true that while lincoln was dying right across the street from where we were. do i -- that they wouldn't let her be with her husband? >> yes. she was in a room next door. they didn't tell her he was dying. she knew it was grave. she talks about that. that is in katherine clinton's book. after he died, she was like why didn't anyone tell me he was dying? you can tell when someone is in that stage. it wasn't stanton who banished her -- it was stanton who banished her from the room. >> because she was weeping and wailing. >> yes. >> she would come in periodically with panic, anxiety and grief, and they would shutting her out to this room next door. i would say in the play, that is quite an event in the play the fact that she was kept out. there was a southern tradition of being there with the dying person, the last moments with your beloved. the fact that she was denied that was just one more thing that marry -- that mary lincoln felt in my play of course, that people were taking control over here. it is quite an event in the play. i had found a report that one of the attending doctors to lincoln kept a little notebook of his pulse all through the night. it was all these numbers. so that interplay interspersed with mary's desire to be with her husband during these moments. >> we talked about acknowledges all of the lincoln scholars, and the wanna be lincoln scholars. so many know a lot about lincoln's life. yet you chose a period where very little is known, giving you a lot of dramatic latitude. did you do that on purpose? >> well, it is a bit intimidating. you are absolutely right. the way i make peace with that by thinking there will always be people who know more about it. but that is not really my job. it is my job as a story-teller and writer to bring that period in mary life to life for an audience. i have to say after doing the first play where there was so much available to me about lincoln. you could read it the rest of your life. with mary, it was a different experience. i did appreciate having a little bit of room to do my own imagining about her. >> you found these small notations, but what was the historical research that went into crafting this play? >> my style with a period piece like this is to start very specifically with things that were written in the time rather than starting with things that are a 21st century lens look thing back. many of the writers, scholars and historians are doing exactly what i am doing in creating a lens to look at the story. so rather than cheat so obviously and just take them at their word what they made of mary lincoln. i went back. the newspapers of the day. you can read all them. aboutth were many books published right after lincoln's death. many wanted to jump on that bandwagon and add their thoughts. some wrote a tiny bit about mary. she was often not in any of those books. that was a big clue to me as well, is how often she was missing from the story of lincoln. one thing i did that i found very interesting is i went back and found about maybe seven or eight plays that had been written right after the assassination about lincoln. and just reading how they treated the story of the civil war, in some ways, mary lincoln, abraham lincoln, some of these plays were wild, much wilder than anything i could write. that liberated me as well. there that liberated me as well because i realized there were writers 150 years ago trying to make sense of this time in a theatrical language as well. that was freeing. then i started to read books that were written in the 20th century. carl sandburg wrote a beautiful, slim volume. he was part of a new wave of writers starting to reconsider the image and reputation of mary lincoln. maybe she had gotten a bad deal in terms of -- for about 50 years after lincoln's death, there was so much negative that was written about her. i started to find some of the things that, if not positive, at least were looking at, maybe there are two sides to this. so it was a -- there was enough source material that i felt like i could find interesting things. >> what was the time from, yes i have this commissioned, to the opening debut? how much time was involved in all that? >> i would say it was about three years, maybe, that i had. i spent a solid year researching. i went back to springfield illinois, to the presidential museum there. i went to lexington to the todd house. and i also spent time with one of the largest privates collectors of lincoln memorabilia, in los angeles, louise taper. she was able to let me look firsthand at some of mary lincoln's, her comb, her bible the gloves she wore to the inauguration. that was incredibly moving to me. >> how many characters are in your play? >> there are eight actors who play a variety of characters. >> are all the characters historically accurate? or do you take some license with them? were all of them known to have gone into that room during that timeperiod? >> no. >> but ehythey all existed at that time. >> queen victoria is in the play. she wrote a letter to mary lincoln that was very famous and she appears to mary in the form of that letter. an actress from "our american cousin," which was the play at ford's that was being acted when the tragedy happened, and the fact that they were linked forever by that event, i was very intrigued why those women -- by those two women and what they might have to say to each other. >> after the tragedy happened, was the play produced again? >> oh yes, that was the most produced play in the country and there were many versions of it. they were booked to do a performance two days later. she went to do it and was brought back to washington because they were all suspects. >> mary bacon, how did you get involved with the project? mary: i did a play called "iron kisses" i can't remember how many years ago. i knew him. when the audition came, just knowing the writer, it is a new play of his, that makes you interested immediately, if you like him, if you believe in their voice on the strength of their play. and that -- and also, for me, my late mother-in-law, my husband's mother, was a really wonderful woman. judy lindsay. and she was in new york city. she went to the theater, she read everything. she read every -- and she was trying her hand at playwriting after a career in journalism and working at columbia university and cpj. she was actually writing a play about mary lincoln. i never got to talk to her about it because she died unexpectedly about four years ago. and i -- it was really creepy that when this came up, i felt obligated to explore, at least -- it did make me pause. what was she so taken with? she herself experienced the death of her first husband untimely death of her first husband, at the age of 36, and the untimely death of her second husband. at the age of -- when he was 62. she was married to her first husband one year longer than her second husband. i thought maybe it was the grief that she went through that was something she was interested in. although i do not know, judy. i do not know. she was very taken with mary todd lincoln. you do an audition. the way james is writing, it reads like poetry. this is a very poetic play. i think, if i may say so, he is writing -- he is writing people's feelings. mary is putting her feelings into words, which is poetic. i have said this a million times. it is beautifully written. and so i wanted to feel how it felt as drama, upon my feet. sometimes i don't know until i am up on my feet in an audition. i am like, wow this really works. that was intriguing. those are the two things i brought to it. susan: is this your first historical character? mary: gosh. my first historical character? susan: if it doesn't immediately come to mind -- this has to be one of the best-known historical characters you have played. people have opinions and they have heard a lot about it. how did you prepare yourself to play this role? someone so well known. mary: i found my mother-in-law's -- we pulled down a box of her stuff and she had four biographies. i started looking at them. i found that biographers really have a hard time keeping their own opinion out of it. it was interesting to read the same event from different perspectives. i just read. then i researched biographies and i tried to discern which ones i felt were going to be more evenhanded, i guess, which ones appealed to me more. i did that. i read what was basically on the internet. and i re-watched "lincoln." because i think sally field did her a great service. how sally field portrayed her was very bright. she was emotional, but what i loved about her portrayal is she had a reason for behaving the way she did when she had a fit to get her husband to do something, or to do something, change something. i liked that a lot. i took from all these different places. actually playing the role, i will tell you, i have not had to work that hard in terms of, i have freed myself completely. and i guess i do as an actor but completely of trying to be like mary lincoln. i don't look anything like her. we have brown hair. body type, we are completely different. that has not been the focus. i think with your previous play, when you are playing lincoln you have to look like lincoln. you have to approximate some semblance. because he's, you know. but mary todd lincoln had a very distinct look. that has not been part of this. what i want to say about james' s play is that i feel like all i have to do is really live in the text. it is all there for me in terms of creating a character. i am not creating one and putting it on top of the words i say. it is evident if i just say those words. if i express it as truthfully as i can, she just emerges, her character. susan: how old was she when the assassination happened? mary: 47. susan: this is a question for both of you. going back to what happened in that box, it is almost unbelievable to think you are sitting and watching a play and your spouse would be shot dead at close range in that environment. how do you capture, how do you understand what kind of emotions people would go through, experiencing that? how do you translate that in what you wrote and what you are producing on the stage? james: i guess starting with me, that was a very big clue to me when you think you are holding your loved one's hand in the moment before he is killed. it's not hard to imagine how traumatic that would be. that is a way in for me to at least have empathy for mary lincoln. i may not understand everything she did. i may not agree with it. the play does not try to make her out to be nicer than she really was. or, you know -- and i don't have an axe to grind. i didn't come into this with an agenda of, i want to set the record straight about mary lincoln. i really wanted to tell the story about this incredibly smart, savvy, political mother and wife who witnessed her husband's death, and what she might have gone through to try to get on with her life. and part of the tragedy with mary lincoln of course is that my play is focused on these 40 days, but as most of us know yes, she left the white house, but her life did not get better. in many ways, it became even more challenging. so that also meant the play, at isn't about, at the end, ok, the sun comes out, and everything is fine. she leaves the room, and that is something. that is a step in her life, but it's not over. it is not an easy one. so i think, how to do that on stage, how to create that, it is terrifying, you know? it was very terrifying to write. it was hard to live with. because i felt like it was my obligation to take that on, as somebody who would had to do what an actor, and eventually mary, would do, to live that three-dimensionally. i wanted to do it as fully as i can. we were talking earlier about the wonderful handoff that happens between a writer and an actor. we are in that process right now. i am handing this off. she is mary lincoln. it is not my mary lincoln now. it is hers. i will let you talk about taking the book on, how you do that. mary: well, how do you do that? how do you create the traumatic experience on stage? one. susan: specifically this one. to imagine living through that how do you capture that without experiencing something that horrific in your own life? mary: well, i am an actor. i will say that any good actor can portray anything that can happen to a human being. susan: so i am asking for the secret to an actor's craft. mary: everyone goes about it a different way. when i was younger, it was about trying to re-create. i have been through more tragedies since then, more death and grief. i am not as surprised by tragic events. susan: is it different when you put the costume on? is it painful? mary: yes. yes and no. there is a hard time when you leave the rehearsal room. you have created everything with the rehearsal. you have a relationship to that skirt. you have put a lot of emotional investment into it. it can be very jarring actually. now that we are here and we are in it, it has been helpful. it is just how -- i have dreams about being in this time period. you know. you know? james: i feel very emotional watching them in costume because there is something about that silhouette, historical silhouette, especially in terms of what women wore then. it is not something i think about all the time, but seeing it again three dimensionally, it is haunting. mary: the restriction is really -- because i think -- susan: the restriction of the corset? mary: that's one thing, the corset, but it is also the weight of the clothes. it is so heavy. you could not move very much. you are so weighed down. how you can move, it is limiting. susan: it is how women were confined physically. mary: and in so many ways. james: that is one of the things the play is about. victorian america, how limiting that was for a woman like mary lincoln, who was educated and smart. mary: it makes me admire her all the more for working with what she had, how she did make herself look beautiful, knowing to put flowers in her hair. she worked it. and i really have a great admiration for that now. because i can see how, what the challenges were. it's in the costume. susan: this play will be staged for a short period of time for the anniversary. what happens to it after this? it is for a short period of time but what will its future be? james: i wish i knew. as a writer in the theater everything i write, i have to imagine and hope it will have life beyond its first production. all my plays have, and i hope this one is no different. it is a very special production of this play, but this play can be done and hopefully will be done in other theaters. they won't have this firsthand relationship with the event, but, you know, it is a big country, and a lot of people have a lot of feelings about mary lincoln. i saw "the heavens are hung in black" in springfield, illinois, at the museum, done by local actors. i was so moved because i did not know until i saw it in springfield how often the word springfield came up in the play. i was sitting with all these townspeople watching a play that was really about springfield. when it was here, it was about washington. i think it will find, hopefully, its home in different places for people that it might have meaning for. susan: hopefully for people who experience the play, what do you want to leave them with? what is the ultimate message for them? james: i will risk sounding -- i coy here, but i have kind of given up on the idea that i can even wish that. what i do hope is that knowing that many people have big opinions about mary lincoln, i hope the play will at least engage those opinions, and if not change them, for a couple of hours, they might consider who mary lincoln was, might have been, and maybe look at her a little differently. susan: and are there universal messages in the play as well? james: absolutely. susan: what do you hope they would be? james: grief is a process. grief is both very private and very public. no one can do it for you. you have to go through that. as mary said, mary lincoln did it on her own terms. that did not please a lot of people, that she did it on her own terms. and i think there is a message in there as well, that sometimes you have to do it. susan: in a very big sense. she basically said, country, i will do this my own way. i don't care if a new president has to come into the white house. you absorbed this character, learning how to prepare and stage. what do you want people to take away from your performance? mary: one thing about playing this role, i have just imagined being a woman in this set of circumstances. and i think in some ways, i hope people will see just -- i don't want to say an ordinary person not that she was ordinary -- just a person going through these circumstances, that all women go through grief, women who lose their husbands, the main source, it was their world. many men or women have to pick up and set their identity without someone -- for mary lincoln, her entire identity was based in abraham lincoln. susan: and financial resources -- no pension after he died. mary: victorian times, what was available for her to do? if she could have found something to do, i think she would have had an easier time. she talks about being the widow, the quiet, charming widow, and what your options are. i hope they will take away a sense of the misogyny of the time, which has a lot to do with how she was perceived and portrayed in that time. it's just -- now, we would never question that a woman needs to grieve, or how she is behaving. it makes complete sense. and to me, the play has always made complete sense. it's very rational to me, how she behaves in this play. i am hoping they will take that away. james: there is a moment in the play where she says very sincerely, what's to become of me? that is a genuine question for mary lincoln in this moment, and i think it is a universal question that we all feel in moments of grief. what is to become of me? where will i go? will i love? i think those are universal things. susan: thanks to both of you the playwright and the actress of mary lincoln. portraying mary lincoln in "the widow lincoln." thank you for your time. >> in the 19th century, the federal government was very limited. they do not have many deployable resources. so t

Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Widow Lincoln Interview 20150208

we are told that manila bay is open. we are to take the rest of our cargo to manila where the railroad bat conference have set up shop to put them together. so we sail around the south china sea. there is so the rock. a proud and sorrowful memory. >> of american history tv visited ford's theatre in washington, d c where abraham lincoln was mortally wounded as he sat to in the presidential lose with his wife mary watching the comedy "the american cousin." commissioned it to mark the anniversary of lincoln's assassination, this is about 30 minutes. >> we're at ford's theater with james still and mary bacon. i want to ask both of you what it is like -- i will start with you, mary bacon, because i think this is a new experience for you, what it is like to produce a lincoln-centered play in ford's theater. with that flag-draped box right by you. what is that experience like? >> it is definitely, what is the word -- very aware of it. i am very aware of it. the first time i stepped into the theater, i was like, whoa. why is there a picture of president washington up there? i don't know the specific history of the theater. i don't, i don't -- i did my research to do the role, but also, i have to say for me, i have thought a lot about how we turn a place into a shrine -- um -- because we know what happened there. but, there are a lot of places where we don't know what happened there, so it is a mixed thing. james has a line in the play and a lot of lines from his play come to me. when i look at the box, i think about him making him an idol. we have anticipated in that veneration, if that makes any sense. >> you have worked with the theater for a while now. you are accustomed to it to some degree. does it ever really leave you, being get near that box? -- being near that box? >> i did not know if i would have the same kind of haunted feeling being in the theater sitting there, but in this case, "the widow lincoln" incorporates the theater into the play. there is a double experience going on. you are watching mary lincoln remembering that night in ford's theater and we are in the audience remembering that night with her in ford's theater. that is a very unique experience for me as a writer. sometimes at ford's theater, they, if i can speak for them, they have to almost deny the box, in a way. if you are doing a play that has nothing to do with lincoln, yet you can't cover it up. you can't not light it. it is they are, always present. in "the widow lincoln," what is wonderful and difficult in a certain way is it is meant to be present. it is meant to be part of the play. i think sitting in the audience, realizing there was a night on april 14 in 1865 that a president and his wife sat in that box and were watching a play just like we are going to be watching a play, and this terrible thing happened, that still moves me, i have to say. i am still moved by that. >> >> this play was commissioned for the 150th anniversary. is there any additional poignancy because of the anniversary? >> >> sure. there is a story about that. i had written another play about abraham lincoln that was set in 1862, the year he worked on the emancipation proclamation. i had always thought there was a second part to that play, not a sequel, but probably that i was not but i did not really know what that was. when ford's came to me and suggested i write a play for the anniversary, i balked a little bit because i felt like i had written my abraham lincoln play, and i thought, well, we all know the ending. we know what happens. there is no drama in that. we don't the president was shot he died the next morning across the street. we know the country went into mourning. researching that time, i had really become, i guess i will say attached to mary lincoln and curious about her, curious about the way that she had been maligned for so many years, and that people are so passionately opinionated about her even now 150 years after that event. i proposed that i had a slightly different idea, which was to focus on mary. president lincoln himself would not really be a character, although of course he looms large in the play. his absence looms large, but it's really about mary. the poignancy about that, what that experience was for mary lincoln, it is experience. >> would you explain the basic premise of the play? tell us what the play is all about. >> the play is about the period of time that mary lincoln spent in the white house right after he was shot because she holed herself up in a room that she had not spent barely any time in for close to six weeks, 40 days, and did not leave. even though johnson was waiting to move in with his family and start running the country from the white house. and that's how she dealt with , it, how she dealt with her grief. that is what it is about, and i guess it is about one's insistence on mourning in her own way. >> did the people immediately like the idea, there will be no lincoln in our anniversary -- >> to the producers credit, he took about one second and said yeah, we'll do that. i think they know my work very well and they know how seriously i approach the subject. i think that paul and his colleagues were taken by the mystery of this. it is really an untold story. there is little written about it. i thought, certainly, someone has written extensively about that time. we don't know what happened. mary herself only wrote about it in one surviving letter. it is a paragraph in which she describes the agony. she does not talk about it in detail. her dressmaker, who was her companion during that time talked about it a little bit in her book, but that is it. you can imagine for me as a dramaturge, there was a lot to imagine. it was a room, when mary was sent back to the white house the next morning after the president died, she would not go into any of the rooms where she had any associated memories. her own bedroom, any of the rooms. she found herself in this particular room, a small room, on the second floor, that had been appointed as a writing room for lincoln for the summer. she went in and would not leave. >> >> >> before we get to that part of the story, isn't it true that while lincoln was dying across the street from where we were, i don't know if this was victorian lore, but they would not let her be with her husband? >> >> she was in the room right next door. they did not tell her he was dying. she knew it was grave. they did not tell her. right after they announced his death, she said, why didn't anyone tell me he was dying? you can tell when someone is in that stage. she was banished from the room. she was weeping and upset. >> she would come in periodically and collapse, panic, anxiety, grief. they would shuttle her out. this room right next door. i would say in the play, that is quite an event, that she was kept out. there was a southern tradition for being with that dying person, to be in that room with your beloved, and the fact that she was denied that is just one more thing that i think mary lincoln felt, in my play, i am talking about, felt that other people were taking control of her. it is quite an event in the play. because i found a report that one of the attending doctor's kept a notebook of his pulse through the night, these numbers. in the play, interspersed with mary's desire to be with her husband during those moments. >> i spoke about acknowledging the lincoln scholars and all of the lincoln wanna-be scholars in the country. you chose some that were very well-known, giving you dramatic latitude. did you do that intentionally? >> it is a big, intimidating -- you are absolutely right. there will always be people who know more about all of this than i do. on the other hand, that is not really my job. my job as a storyteller and a writer, to bring mary lincoln and that time in her life to life for the audience. but i have to say after the first play, there was so much available to me about lincoln. you can read for the rest of your life. with mary, it was a different experience. i did appreciate having a little bit of room to do my own imagining about her. >> so what was your source of information? you found small notations. what research went into -- >> my style with a period piece is to start specifically with things that were written in the time rather than starting with things that are 21st century lens looking back. many of those wonderful writers, scholars, and historians, are doing what i am doing, looking at sources and creating a lens through which to tell the story. rather than cheat so obviously and take them at their word, what they made of mary lincoln i went back -- newspapers of the day, you can read all of those. there are many books that were published right after lincoln's death. many people wanted to jump on that bandwagon and join the many who thought they had something original to say about lincoln. some of them, not to many, wrote a tiny bit about mary. she was often not in any of their books. that was interesting and a big clue to me as well, how often she was missing from the story of lincoln. one thing that i found very interesting is i went back and i found about seven or eight plays that had been written right after the assassination about lincoln. just reading how they treated the story of the civil war, in some ways mary lincoln, abraham lincoln, some of the plays were wild. that liberated me as well because i realized there were writers 150 years ago trying to make sense of this time in a theatrical language as well. that was freeing. then i started to read books that were written in the 20th century. carl sandburg wrote a beautiful, slim volume. he was part of a new wave of writers starting to reconsider the image and reputation of mary lincoln. maybe she had gotten a bad deal in terms of -- for about 50 years after lincoln's death, there was so much negative that was written about her. i started to find some of the things that, if not positive, at least were looking at, maybe there are two sides to this. there was enough source material that i felt like i could find interesting things. >> what was the time from, yes i have this commissioned, to the opening debut? >> i would say it was about three years, maybe, that i had. i spent a solid year researching. i went back to springfield illinois, to the presidential museum. i went to lexington to the todd house. i also spent time with one of the largest privates collectors of lincoln memorabilia. she was able to let me look firsthand at some of mary lincoln's, her comb, her bible the gloves she wore to the inauguration. that was incredibly moving to me. >> how many players are in your play? >> there are eight actors who play a variety of characters. >> are all the characters historically accurate? were all of them known to have gone into that room? >> no. queen victoria is in the play. she wrote a letter to mary lincoln that was very famous and she appears to mary in the form of that letter. but in three dimension. an actress from "our american cousin," which was the play at ford's that was being acted when the tragedy happened, and the fact that they were linked forever by that event, i was very intrigued why those women at what they might have to say to each other. >> after the tragedy happened, was the play produced again? >> that was the most produced play in the country and there were many versions of it. they were booked to do a performance. they were all suspects, and she was brought back to washington. >> mary bacon, how did you get involved with the project? >> i did a play called "iron kisses" i can't remember how many years ago. i knew him. when the audition came, just knowing the writer, it is a new play of his, that makes you interested immediately, if you like him, if you believe in their voice on the strength of their play. also, for me, my late mother-in-law, my husband's mother was a really wonderful woman. judy lindsay. she was in new york city. she went to the theater, she read everything. she was trying her hand at playwriting after a career in journalism. she was actually writing a play about mary lincoln. i never got to talk to her about it because she died unexpectedly about four years ago. it was really creepy that when this came up, i felt obligated to explore, at least it did make me pause. what was she so taken with? she herself experienced the death of her first husband untimely death of her first husband, at the age of 36, and the untimely death of her second husband. she was married to her first husband one year longer than her second husband. i thought maybe it was the grief that she went through that was something she was interested in. i do not know. she was very taken with mary todd lincoln. you do an audition. and then you get up on its feet, because the way james is writing, it reads like poetry. if i may say, because he is writing, years writing -- this is a very poetic play. he is writing people's feelings. mary is putting her feelings into words, which is poetic. i have said this a million times. it is beautifully written. i wanted to feel how it felt as drama, you know, as drama up on my feet. sometimes i don't know until i am up on my feet in an audition. that was intriguing. those are the two things i brought to it. >> is this your first historical character? >> gosh. my first historical character? >> if it doesn't immediately come to mind -- this has to be one of the best-known historical characters you have played. people have opinions and they have heard a lot about it. how did you prepare yourself to play this role? >> i found my mother-in-law's -- we pulled down a box of her stuff and she had four biographies. i started looking at them. and then i found that biographers really have a hard time keeping their own opinion outfit. and that was clear as i read about the same event from two different perspectives. so, i just read. then i researched biographies and i tried to discern which ones i felt were going to be more evenhanded, i guess, which ones appealed to me more. so i did that. , i read what was basically on the internet. i re-watched "lincoln." because i think sally fields did her a great service. i think sally fields portrayed her as very bright. what i loved about her portrayal was she had a reason. when she had a fit, to get her husband to do something. it was not just being emotion. she was emotional, but what i loved about her portrayal is she had a reason for behaving the way she did when she had a fit to get her husband to do something, or to do something, change something. i liked that a lot. i took from all these different places. actually playing the role, i will tell you, i have not had to work that hard in terms of, i have freed myself completely. i guess i do as an actor, but completely from trying to be like mary lincoln. i don't look anything like her. we have brown hair. body type we are completely , different. that has not been the focus. i think with your previous play, when you are playing lincoln you have to look like lincoln. you have to approximate some semblance. because he is -- you know -- but, mary todd lincoln had a very distinct look. that has not been part of this. what i want to say about james' play is i feel like all i have to do is live in the text. it is all there for me in terms of creating a character. i am not creating one and putting it on top of the words i say. it is evident if i just say those words. and the experience to the best of my ability and truthfully if i can she just emerges, her , character. >> how old was she when the assassination happened? >> 47. >> is a question for both of you. going back to what happened in that box, it is almost unbelievable to think you are sitting and watching a play and your spouse would be shot dead at close range in that environment. how do you capture, how do you understand what kind of emotions people would go through? how do you translate that in what you wrote and what you are producing on the stage? >> i guess starting with me, that was a very big clue to me when you think you are holding your loved one's hand in the moment before he is killed. it's not hard to imagine how traumatic that would be. that is a way in for me to at least have empathy for mary lincoln. i may not understand everything she did. i may not agree with it. the play does not try to make her out to be nicer than she really was. i don't have an axe to grind. i did not come into this with an agenda, i want to set the record straight about mary lincoln. i really wanted to tell the story about this incredibly smart, savvy, political mother and wife who witnessed her husband's death and what she might have gone through to try to get on with her life. part of the tragedy with mary lincoln is that my play is focused on these 40 days, but as most of us know, yes, she left the white house, but her life did not get better. in many ways, it became even more challenging. that also meant the play, at the end, ok, the sun comes out, and everything is fine. she leaves the room, and that is something. that is a step in her life, but it's not over. it is not an easy one. so, how to do that on stage, how to create that, it is terrifying, you know? it was very terrifying to write. it was hard to live with. i felt like it was my obligation to take that on, as somebody who would live that three-dimensionally. i wanted to do it as fully as i can. we were talking earlier about the wonderful handoff that happens between a writer and an actor. we are in that process right now. i am handing this off. she is very lincoln. it is not my mary lincoln now. it is hers. i will let you talk about how you do that. >> well, how do you do that? how do you create the traumatic experience on stage? >> to imagine living through that, how do you capture that without experiencing something that horrific in your own life? >> well, i am an actor. i will say that any good actor can portray anything that can happen to a human being. >> it is the actor's craft. >> everyone goes about it a different way. when i was younger, it was about trying to re-create. i have been through more tragedies since then, more death and grief. i am not as surprised by tragic events. >> is it different when you put the costume on? >> painful. yes. yes and no. there is a hard time when you leave the rehearsal room. you have created everything with the rehearsal. you have a relationship to that skirt. you have put a lot of emotional investment into it. it can be very jarring actually. now that we are here and we are in it, it has been helpful. it is just how -- i have dreams about being in this time period. >> i feel very emotional watching them in costume because there is something about that silhouette, historical silhouette, especially in terms of what women wore then. it is not something i think about all the time, but seeing it three dimensionally, it is haunting. >> the restriction is really -- one thing, the corset, but it is also the weight of the clothes. it is so heavy. you could not move very much. you are so weighed down. how you can move, it is limiting. >> it is how women were confined physically. >> in so many ways. >> that is one of the things the play is about. victorian america, how limiting that was for a woman like mary lincoln, who was educated. >> it makes me admire her all the more for working with what she had, how she did make herself look beautiful, knowing to put flowers in her hair. she worked it. i have a great admiration for that now. i can see how, what the challenges were. >> this play will be staged for a short period of timed for the anniversary. what happens to it after this? what will its future be? >> i wish i knew. as a writer in the theater everything i write, i have to imagine and hope it will have life beyond its first production. i hope this one is no different. it is a very special production of this play, but this play can be done and hopefully will be done in other theaters. they won't have this firsthand relationship with the event, but, you know, it is a big country, and a lot of people have a lot of feelings about mary lincoln. in springfield, illinois, at the museum, there was a play done by local actors. i was so moved because i did not know until i saw it in springfield how often the word springfield came up in the play. i was sitting with all these townspeople. it was really about springfield. when it was here, it was about washington. i think it will find, hopefully, its home in different places for people that it might have meaning for. >> hopefully for people who experience the play, what do you want to leave them with? what is the ultimate message for them? >> i will risk sounding -- i have kind of given up on the idea that i can even wish that. what i do hope is that knowing that many people have big opinions about mary lincoln, i hope the play will at least engage those opinions, and if not change them, for a couple of hours, they might consider who mary lincoln was, might have been, and maybe look at her little differently. >> are there universal messages in the play? >> absolutely. >> what you hope they would be? >> grief is a process. grief is both very private and very public. no one can do it for you. you have to go through that. as mary said, mary lincoln did it on her own terms. that did not please a lot of people, that she did it on her own terms. i think there is a message in there as well, that sometimes you have to do it. >> she basically said, i will do this my own way. i don't care if a new president has to come into the white house. you absorbed this character, learning how to prepare and stage. what do you want people to take away from your performance? >> one thing about playing this role, i have just imagined being a woman in this set of circumstances. i think in some ways, i hope people will see an ordinary person, just a person going through these circumstances, that all women go through grief, women who lose their husbands, the main source, it was their world. many men or women have to pick up and set their identity without someone -- for mary lincoln, she was based in abraham lincoln. >> no pension after he died. >> victorian times, what was available for her to do? if she could have found something to do, i think she would have had an easier time. she talks about being the widow, the quiet, charming widow, and what your options are. i hope they will take away a sense of the misogyny of the time, which has a lot to do with how she was perceived and portrayed in that time. now we would never question that a woman needs to grieve, or how she is behaving. it makes complete sense. to me, playing it has always made complete sense. how she behaves in this play is very rational to me. i am hoping they will take that away. >> there is a moment in the play where she says very sincerely, what's to become of me? that is a genuine question for mary lincoln in this moment, and i think it is a universal question that we all feel in those moments of intense loss and grief. what is to become of me? where will i go? will i love? so, i feel like those are universal things. >> thanks to both of you, the playwright and the actress of mary lincoln. thank you for your time. >> they discuss the film so most portrayal of events and the role lyndon johnson played.

Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Widow Lincoln Interview 20150215

the presidential box, watching the popular comedy our american cousin. he died the next morning. we sat down with playwright james still and actor mary bacon to talk about the production of the widow lincoln. this is about 30 minutes. >> we're at ford theater with james still and actor mary bacon about the play the widow lincoln. before we get started about the particulars of the play i wanted to ask both of you, what it is like and i want to start with you, mary because i think this is a new experience for you. james still has been here before, but what it's like to produce a lincoln centered play in ford theater with that flag draped box right in the room with you? what's that experience like? >> well it's definitely -- what's the word? very aware of it. i'm very aware of it. the first time i stepped into theater i was like whoa. and i thought why this a picture of the president there? because i don't know a lot of the specific history of the theater. i don't -- i just -- since my research into the role. but also i have to say for me i thought a lot about how we turn a place into a shrine because we know what happened there. but that there's a lot of places where we just don't know what happened there. and so it's a mixed thing. it's -- james has a line in the play, a lot of lines from his play come to me. he says god gives us our beloved ones, we make them our idols and they are taken from us. and i think that about that when i look at that box. i think about making him -- make him an idol and of course you know it's an easy -- it's just that we have participated in that generation. if that makes any sense. >> you have been -- you worked with the theater for a while. you're accustomed to it. but does it ever really leave you, being near that box? >> no. i didn't know coming back this time if i would have that same kind of haunted feeling being in the theater, sitting there. but in this case the widow lincoln actually incorporates ford's theater into the play. and so there's sort of a double experience going on. you're watching mary lincoln remembering that night in ford's theater and we're in the audience remembering that night with her in ford's theater. so that's a very unique experience for me as a writer. i think sometimes at ford's theater they -- if i can speak for them they have to almost deny the box in a way. if you're doing a play to have nothing do to do with lincoln and yet you can't cover it up you can't not light it it's there, it's always present. so the widow lincoln what's wonderful and difficult in a certain way is that it is meant to be present. it is meant to be part of the play. and so i think sitting in the audience realizing there was a night on april 14th 1865 that a president and his wife sat in that box and were watching a play just like we're going to be watching a play. and this terrible thing happened. that still moves me. i have to say i'm still moved by that. >> this play was commissioned for the anniversary. is there any additional point yency because of the anniversary? >> sure. there is a story behind that. i had written another play about abraham lincoln that was set in 1862, the year that he was working on the emancipation proclamation. i had always thought there was a second part to that play not a sequel but probably that it was -- i was not finished yet with the lincoln story. but i didn't really know what that was, when ford's came to me and suggested i write a play for the 150th anniversary. i balked because i felt like i had written my abraham lincoln play, and i also thought well we all know the ending. we all know what happened. there's no drama in that. we know the president was shot. we know that he died the next morning across the street. and we know the country went into mourning. but in that earlier play and in my research in that time i had really become -- i guess i will say attach to marry lincoln and curious about her. and curious about the ways that she had been maligned for so many years, and that people are so passionately pinion eighted about her even know 150 years after that event. and so i really proposed to fords i had a slightly different idea, which was to focus on mary, and that president lincoln himself would not really be a character, although of course he looms large in the play his absence i would say looms large. but he -- it's really about mary and -- the -- what was that experience for mary lincoln? it is important 150th 150th anniversary. >> would you explain the basic premise of the play rather than having the playwright do it? >> what is the play about? the play is about the period of time that mary lincoln spent in the white house right after he was shot because she holed herself up in a room that she had not been -- spent barely any time in for close to six weeks, fridays. and did not leave even though jonathan was waiting to move with the family and start running the country from the white house. and that's how she dealt with it, how she dealt with her grief. and that's what it's about. everything that's happening in the country while she's there, and -- i guess it's about a woman's insistence on mourning in her own way. >> is the ford people immediately like the idea when you said there will be no lincoln in our anniversary play? >> you know to -- the producer's credit i would say he took about one second and said yeah we'll do that. and so i think you know they know my work very well and they know how seriously i approach the subject. and i think -- i think that paul and his colleagues were taken by the mystery of this. it's really an untold story. there is very little written about it. i discovered it was really a footnote in a book, an article, something, and i thought truly someone's written extensively about that time. and, of course, one of the reasons historians happen is we don't know what happened. there's very little. mary herself only wrote about it in one surviving letter and it's a paragraph in which she describes the agony of this. but she doesn't talk about it in detail. her dressmaker elizabeth kekley, who was her companion during that time talks about it a little bit in her book but that's it. so you can imagine for me as a drama there was a lot waiting for me to imagine. >> does the room in the white house that she holed up in still exist? >> it was on the second floor. i'm sure in some version it still exists. it was a room when mary was brought back to the white house the next morning after the president died, she wouldn't go into any of the rooms where she had any associated memories, so her own bedroom, any of the rooms. and she found herself in this particular room, which was a small room living quarters on the second floor that had been appointed to be sort of a writing room for lincoln for the summer. and she went in and wouldn't leave. >> but before we get to that part of the story, isn't it true that while lincoln was dying right across the street from where we were, i don't know if this was victorian or not but they would not let her be with her husband, they took her out of the room? >> she was in a little room right next door and they didn't tell her he was dying, like she knew it was grave but they didn't tell her. she talks about that that you know, that's in catherine clinton's book she said why didn't anyone tell me he was dying, that he was at his last you know his last breath? which you can, you know -- you can tell when someone is in that stage. so yeah they -- banished her from the room. >> she was a weeping woman, right? >> he said she was weeping. >> she would come in periodically and collapse, and panic, anxiety, grief, and they would shuttle her out. this room right next door, i would say in the play that's quite an event in the play the fact that she was kept out, because there was a tradition of being with that dying person for the wife to be there in the last moments with your beloved and the fact that she was denied that was just one more thing that i think mary lincoln felt in my play, i'm talking about, felt, you know that other people were taking control over her. and so it's quite an event in the play because i had found a report that one of the attending doctors to lincoln kept a little notebook of his pulse all through the night. and it just was these numbers. and so in the play interexpertsed with mary's desire to be with her husband during those moments. >> you and i had a chance to talk before we started recording this, about acknowledging all of the lincoln scholars, and all of the lincoln wasn't in a be scholars. so many people know a great deal about lincoln's life. and yet you chose a period where very little is known. giving you a lot of dramatic latitude. did you do that intentionally so that there wouldn't be people saying you got this wrong, you got that wrong? >> well it is a bit intimidating, because you're absolutely right. and the way i make piece peace with that there will be people who know more about all of this than i do. on the other hand, that's not really my job. my job is really as a story teller, and is as an empathy writer to bring mary lincoln and that time in her life to viv id life for an audience. after doing the first play there was so much available to me about lincoln. you can read for the rest of your life and -- but with mary it was a different experience. and i -- i did appreciate having a little bit of room to do my own imagining about her. >> what was your source of information? you found the small notations but what was the historical research that went into your crafting of the story? >> sure. my style with a period piece like this is to start very specifically with things that were written in the time, rather than starting with things that are 21st century lens looking back, because in a certain way those wonderful writers, many of them scholars and historians are doing exactly what i'm doing. they're looking at sources and creating a lens through which to tell that story. so rather than cheat so obviously and take them at their word, what they made of mary lincoln, i went back some interest things newspapers of the day, you can read all of those newspapers of the day. there are many books that were published right after lincoln's death. many people wanted to jump on that bandwagon and, you know join the many who thought they had something original to say about lincoln. and some of them not very many but some wrote a tiny bit about mary. she was often not in any of those books. so that was interesting. that was a big clue to me, as well, is how often she was missing from the story of lincoln. one thing i did that i found very interesting is i went back and i found about maybe seven or eight plays that had been written right after the assassination about lincoln. and just reading how they treated the story of the civil war in some ways mary lincoln, abraham lincoln, some of them were wild much wilder than anything i could write. that kind of liberated me, as well, because i realized there were writers, 150 years ago, trying to make sense of this time. and so that was -- i read books written in the 20th century a beautiful, small, slim volume and he was part of the new wave of writers who were starting to reconsider the image and reputation of mary lincoln, that maybe she had gotten a bad deal in terms of -- because for about 50 years after lincoln's death there was so much negative written about her. i started to find some of the things that if not positive at least we're looking at maybe there are two sides to this. there was enough source material that i felt like i could find interest things. >> and what was the time from yes i have this commission until the opening debut night? how much time was involved? >> i would say it was about three years maybe, that i had. so really spent a solid year researching, i went back to springfield, illinois, to the presidential museum there. i went to lexington to the house, and i also spent time with one of the largest private collectors of lincoln memorabilia in los angeles louise taper, and she was able to let me look firsthand at some of mary's you know her comb her bible, the gloves that she wore at innation inauguration. >> how many characters are in your play? >> there are eight actors who play a variety of characters. >> are all the character is historically accurate or do you take license with them? were all of them known to have gone into that room during that time period? >> oh no no. >> but they all existed at that time? >> they are. queen victoria is in the play. she wrote a letter that was famous, and she appears to mary in the form of that letter but in three dimensions. laura keene, the actress and our american cousin -- >> whose play it was? >> whose play was at ford's, our american cousin that was being acted when the terrible thing, tragedy happened on stage, and the fact that lawyer' and mary lincoln were linked forever by that event, i was very intrigued by those two women and what they might have to say to each other. >> sidebar question after the tragedy happened here was the play ever produced again? >> oh yes, that play was the most produced play in the country and there were many versions of it. they were booked to do a performance two days later. she went to cincinnati to do it but she was brought back to washington because they were all suspects. >> interesting. >> she continued. >> so mary bacon how did you get involved with this project? >> well i did a premier of james, play of james, called iron kisses. i can't remember how many years ago. but i knew -- i knew him, and then so when the audition came up, just knowing the writer and that it's a new play of his, that makes you interested immediately, if you liked him. and you believe in their voice and the strength of their plays. and -- and also for me my late mother-in-law, my husband's mother, was a really wonderful woman, judy lindsay. and she was in new york city. she went to a theater. she read everything. she read ever -- she was trying her hand at playwriting after a career at colombia university. and she she was actually writing a play about mary lincoln. and i never got to talk to her about it because she died unex-expectedly about four years ago. and i -- it was really creepy that when this came up i felt obligated to explore at least -- it did make me pause and think what was she so taken with? she herself experienced the death of her first husband untimely death of her first husband at the i'll an of 36 and then the untimely death of her second husband when he was 62. she was married to her first husband one year longer than her second husband. and i thought maybe it's the grief that she went through that was something she was interested in. although i do not know judy i do not know. but she was very taken with mary lincoln. and then i -- then you know you do an audition and get it up on its feet. the way james is writing it reads like poetry. and this is a poetic play. if i may say so it's -- he's writing people's feelings. mary is putting her feelings into words, which is poetic. and the way it's -- i said this a million times, beautifully written. and so i wanted to feel how it felt as a drama, as drama up on my feet. and sometimes i don't know that until i'm up on my feet in an audition. and i think that really works. and that of course, was intriguing. so those are the two things i brought to it with my prior experience with james. >> is it your first historical character? >> oh my gosh. i'm sure -- i'm terrible when i -- my first historical character? well if it doesn't immediately come to you, this is certainly -- has to be one of the best known historical characters you've ever played. >> yes. >> people have opinions and they read a lot about her. so how did you prepare yourself to play this role? >> well, i started -- i found my mother's -- my mother-in-law's -- we pulled down a box of her stuff, and she had like four biographies, so i started looking at them. and then i found that biographers have a hard time keeping their own opinion out of it, and that was clear when i would read it from two different perspectives. and so i just read. and then i researched biographies and tried to discern which ones i felt were going to be more evenhanded, i guess, which ones appealed to me more. and so i did that. and then i read what was basically what you can look up on the internet. and i rewatched lincoln because i think sally field did her great service. i think how she portrayed mary lincoln was very bright emotional but to me what i loved about her portrayal is she had a reason for behaving the way she did when she had a fit, you know, to get her husband to do something or to get something -- you know, to do something, to change something, not just being emotional. and i liked that a lot. >> i took from all these different places. but actually playing did role i will tell you i haven't had to work that hard in terms of like i have freed myself completely and i guess i do as an actor, but completely of trying to be like mary lincoln. i've never been told to try to look like her. i don't look anything like her. we have brown hair but body type we're completely different. and that's not been the focus where i think with your previous play, when you're playing lincoln you have to look like lincoln, you have to approximate some semblance to the -- because, you know -- but mary lincoln had a very distinct look and that's not been the part of this. but what i want to say about james' play is that i feel all i have to do is really live in the text, because it's all there for me. in terms of like creating a character, i'm not creating one and putting it on top of the words i've been given to say. i think they just -- it's evident if i just say those words and experience the ability as truthfully as i can. she just emerges, her character, which i was -- go ahead. >> how old was she when the assassination happened? >> 47. >> 47? >> 47. >> and i guess it's a question for both of you in terms of interpretation. going back to what happened in that box, it's almost unbelievable to imagine you're sitting and watching a play and that your spouse would be shot dead at close rang in that environment. how do you capture -- how do you understand what kind of emotion people would go through experiencing that? and how do you translate it both in what you wrote and in what you're producing on the stage? >> well i guess starting with me, that was a very big clue to me when you think, you know you're holding your loved one's hand in the moment before he's killed. it's not hard to imagine how traumatic that would be. that is a way in for me to at least have empathy for mary lincoln. i may not understand everything she did, i may not agree with it. the play doesn't try to make her out to be nicer than she really was or you know and i don't have an ax to grind. i didn't come into this with an agenda of i want to set the record straight about mary lincoln. i really wanted to tell the story about this incredibly smart, savvy, political mother and wife who witnessed her husband's death. and the -- what she might have gone through to try to get on with her life. and part of the tragedy with mary lincoln, of course is that my play is focused on these fridays, but as most of us know yes, she left that white house but you know her life didn't get better. in many ways it became even more challenging. so that also meant the play isn't about, you know at the end, okay, the fun comes out and everything is fine. she leaves the room and that is something that is a step in her life. but it's -- it's not over. it's not an easy one. so i think how to do that on stage, how to create that it's terrifying. it was very terrifying to write. it was hard to live with because i felt like it was my obligation to take that on as somebody who had to do what i knew and after and eventually mary would do which would be to live that three dimensionally. so i wanted to do it as fully as i can to make it an offer we were talking earlier about, that wonderful hand off that happens between a writer and actor. and we're in that process right now really where i'm handing this off and she is mary lincoln. it's not my mary lincoln now, it's hers. and so i'll let you talk about that, how you do that. >> well how do you do that? how do you create a traumatic experience on stage? >> to imagine living lieu that how do you capture that without ever experiencing something that horrific in your own life? >> well as an actor i will say that any actor, a good actor, hopefully, can portray anything that can happen to a human being. >> i'm asking for the secret to the actor's craft. >> i think everyone probably goes about it a different way. i think when i was younger it was a lot about trying to recreate. i don't -- i've been through more tragedy since then, and more deaths and grief. i'm not as surprised by tragic events, you know. >> was it different when you put the costumes on? >> it was painful. >> was it? >> yes. yes and -- yes and no. there's a really hard time when you leave the rehearsal room. you created everything with the rehearsal props, you have a relationship to that skirt and you put a lot of emotional investment into it. so it can be very jarring, actually. but now that we're here and we're in the actual clothes, it's been helpful because it's just how the -- you know, i'm starting to have dreams about being in this time period you know. >> i feel very emotional watching them in costume because there's something about the silhouette, the historical silhouette especially in terms of what women wore then. you know, it's not something i think about all the time. but all the you hads enseing it again three dimensionally, it's haunting. >> the restriction is -- the restriction is really -- because i think one thing i -- >> restriction of the -- >> of the clothes, the corset but the weight of those clothes. they were so heavy. and women -- you couldn't move very much. and then you're so weighed down and how you can move is limiting. >> how women work and find physically. >> absolutely. in so many ways. >> that's one of the things the play is about, is about victoria america how -- what that -- how limiting that was for a woman like mary lincoln who was educated and smart. >> and makes you admire her all the more for working with what she had, how she did make herself look beautiful, and knowing to put flowers in her hair, and like she just -- she worked it. and i really have a great admiration for that now, because i can see how -- what the challenges were. >> this play will be staged -- is staged for a short period of time for the anniversary. what happens to it after this? it's a special project for a special event in time but what will its future be? >> i wish i knew. i mean, as a writer, in the theater, i always -- everything i write i have to imagine and hope it will have life beyond its first production. and i have to -- all of my lays have and i hope this one is no different. obviously this is a very special production of this play but this play can be done and hopefully will be done at other theaters who don't have this firsthand relationship with the event. but you know it's a big country and a lot of people have a lot of feeling about mary lincoln. i saw the heavens are black in springfield, illinois, at the museum done by local actors and i was so moved because i didn't know until i saw it in springfield how often the world "springfield" came up in that play, and suddenly i was sitting with all these people watching a play that was really about springfield, when it was here it was about washington. and so i think that's you know it will just be -- it will find hopefully its home in different places to people that this might have meaning for. >> for people who come and experience the play what do you want to leave them with? what is the ultimate message of this play for them? >> i will risk sounding coy but i've kind of given up on the idea of i can even wish that. what i do hope is that knowing that many many people have big opinions about mary lincoln, that i hope the play will at least engage those opinions. and if not change them for a couple of hours they might consider who mary lincoln was, might have been and maybe look at her a little differently. >> are there universal messages in the play as well? >> absolutely. >> what would those be? what do you hope those would be? >> i think grief is a process grief is both very private and very public. and no one can do it for you. that you have to go through that. and as mary said mary lincoln did it on her own terms. and that didn't please a lot of people that she did it on her own terms. and i think there's a message in there, as well, that sometimes you have to do it. >> a very big -- she basically said country, i'm going to do this my own way, i don't care that the president needs to come into the white house. i guess we'll close with the same question for you. you absorbed this character and learning how to portray her on stage. what do you want people to take away from your performance? >> well, i was going to say this earlier what i think about -- one thing about playing this role i have just imagined being a woman in this set of circumstances, and i think that in some ways i hope that people will see just -- i don't want to say an ordinary person, not that she was ordinary but just like a person going through these circumstances that all women -- you know all women go through grief. women who lose their husbands, whose main source of some of -- was their world, how many world have to pick up or men have to pick up and fill their identity without someone -- i think for mary lincoln her identity was based in abraham. >> no pension after he died. >> that's right. >> and then you know, that's victorian time like what was available to her to do? if she could have found something to do i think she would have had a easier time but women at -- she talks about being the widow, the quiet, charming widow and what your options are. so i'm hoping they'll take away a sense of the time which has a lot to do with how she was perceived and portrayed in that time. now we don't -- we would never question that a woman needs to grief, or how she is behaving makes complete sense. to me praying has always made complete sense. it's rational to me how she behaves in this play. i'm hoping they'll take that away with them. >> there's a moment the play where she says what's to become of me? and that's a genuine question for mary lincoln in this moment. i think it's a universal question we all feel in those moments of intense loss and grief, what is to become of me? what am i going to do? where will i go? will i love? so i feel like those were universal things. >> who am i? >> well thanks to both of you. the play writ and the actor of mary lincoln portraying mary lincoln in the widow lincoln. thank you for your time. >> thank you. >> with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and the senate on c-span two, here on c-span-3 we complement the coverage by showing you the most relevant congressional hearings and public events. on weekends c-span 3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's story, including six unique series. visiting battlefields and key events, american artifacts, touring museums and historic sites. history bookshelf, the best known american history writers, the presidency, looking at the policies and legacies of our nation's commanders in chief. lectures and history, with top college professors delving into america's past. our new series real america, featuring our government and educational films from the 1930s through the 70s. c-span 3 created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. tonight on q&a, filmmaker thomas allen harris explores

Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Widow Lincoln Interview 20150216

i am very aware of it. i'm very aware of it. the first time i stepped into the theater i was like whoa. why is there a picture of president washington up there ? i don't know a lot of the specific history of the theater. i don't know just -- since my you know research to do the role. but also, i have to say for me, i have thought a lot about how we turn a place into a shrine because we know what happened there. there are a lot of places where we don't know what happened there, so it is a mixed thing. james has a line in the play, and a lot of lines from his play come to me. where he says, you know, god gives us our beloved ones. we make them our idols and then they are taken from us. and i think about that when i look at the box. i think about making him -- we made him an idol, and of course you know, it's a great idol. it's just that we have participated in that veneration. if that makes any sense. >> james you've had -- you've worked with the theater for awhile now. you're accustomed to it to some degree. does it ever really leave you, being near that box? >> no. i didn't know coming back this time if i would have the same kind of haunted feeling being in the theater. sitting there. but in this case, "the widow lincoln" actually incorporates ford's theater into the play. so there's a sort of a double experience going on. you are watching mary lincoln remembering that night in ford's theater and we are in the audience remembering that night with her in ford's theater. that is a very unique experience for me as a writer. i think sometimes at ford's theater, they, if i can speak for them they have to almost deny the box, in a way. if you're doing a play that has nothing to do with lincoln and yet you can't cover it up. you can't not light it. it's there. it's always present. so i would say in "the widow lincoln" what's wonderful and difficult in a certain way is that it is meant to be present. it is meant to be part of the play. i think sitting in the audience, realizing there was a night on april 14th in 1865 that a president and his wife sat in that box and were watching a play just like we're going to be watching a play. and this terrible thing happened. that stills moves me. i have to say. i'm still moved by that. >> this play was commissioned for the 150th anniversary. is there any additional poignancy because of the anniversary? >> well, sure. there is a little story behind that. i had written another play about abraham lincoln that was set in 1862, the year he worked on the emancipation proclamation. it was called the heavens are hung in black, premiered here at ford's theater. i had always thought there was a second part to that play, not a sequel but probably that it was -- i was not finished yet with the lincoln story, but i didn't really know what that was. when ford's came to me and suggested i write a play for the 150th anniversary, i balked a little bit because i felt like i had written my abraham lincoln play. and i also thought well we all know the ending. we all know what happened. there is no drama in that. we know the president was shot. we know that he died the next morning across the street. we know the country went into mourning. but in that earlier play, and in my research in that time, i had really become, i guess i will say, attached to mary lincoln and curious about her. and curious about the ways that she had been maligned for so many years. and that people are so passionately opinionated about her, even now, 150 years after that event. so i really proposed to ford's that i had a slightly different idea, which was to focus on mary. and that president lincoln himself would not really be a character. although of course he looms large in the play. his absence, i would say, looms large. but he -- it's really about mary. and that -- so the poignancy of that what was that experience for mary lincoln it is important 150th anniversary. >> would you explain the basic premise of the play? rather than having the playwright do it tell us what the play is all about. so people understand what we're talking about. >> what is the play about? the play is about the period of time that mary lincoln spent in the white house right after he was shot. because she holed herself up in a room that she had not spent barely any time in for close to six weeks, 40 days, and did not leave. even though johnson was waiting to move in with his family and start running the country from the white house. and that's how she dealt with it. how she dealt with her grief. and that's what it's about. and everything that's happening in the country while she's there, and it's -- i guess it's about a woman's insistence on mourning in her own way. >> did the ford's people immediately like the idea when you said there will be no lincoln in our anniversary play? >> you know, to the producer's credit i would say he took about one second and said yeah, we'll do that. and so i think you know, they know my work very well and they know how seriously i approach the subject. i think that paul and his colleagues were taken by the mystery of this. and it's really an untold story. there's very little written about it. i mean i discovered it was really a footnote in a book, an article, something and i thought, surely someone has written extensionvely about that time. and of course one of the reasons historians haven't is that we don't know what happened. there's very little. mary herself only wrote about it in one surviving letter. and it's really a paragraph in which she describes the agony of it. but she doesn't talk about it in detail. her dressmaker, elizabeth keckley who was her companion during that time talks about it a little bit in her book. but that's it. so you can imagine for me as a dramatist there was a lot to imagine. >> does the room in the white house she was holed up in still exist? >> that's a great question. it was on the second floor. i'm sure in some version it exists. it was a room when mary was brought back to the white house the next morning after the president died, she wouldn't go in to any of the rooms where she had any associated memories. so her own bedroom. any of the rooms. she found herself in this particular room, which was a small room. it was in the living quarters in the second floor that had been appointed to be sort of a writing room for lincoln for the summer. and she went in and wouldn't leave. >> before we get to that part of the story, isn't it true that while lincoln was dying across the street from where we were, i don't know if this was victorian mores or what but they would not let her be with her husband? they took her out of the room? >> she was in a room right next door. they didn't tell her he was dying. like, she knew it was grave. but they didn't tell her -- she talks about that. that -- that you know, that's in catherine clinton's book right after they announced his death to her. why didn't anyone tell me that he was dying? that he was at his last you know, his last breaths. which you can, you know, you can tell when someone is in that stage. so, yeah was it stanton who banished her from the room, in our play. in james' play banished her from the room. >> because she was weeping and wailing woman, right? >> because she was weeping and upset. >> she would come in periodically and you know, collapse in panic, anxiety, grief. and they would shovel her out. and you know it was this room right next door. i would say in the play that's quite an event in the play. the fact that she was kept out. because there was a southern tradition of being with that dying person for the wife you know, to be there with that in the last moments with your beloved. and the fact that she was denied that was just one more thing that i think mary lincoln felt in my play i'm talking about, felt, you know that other people were taking control over her. and so it's quite an event in the play. because i had found a report that one of the attending doctors to lincoln kept a little notebook of his pulse all through the night. and it just was these numbers. and so in the play, interspersed with mary's desire to be with her husband during those moments. >> you and i had a chance to talk before we started recording this about acknowledging all of the genuine lincoln scholars, and all of the lincoln wanna-be scholars there are in the country. so so many people know a great deal about lincoln's life. and yet, you chose a period where very little is known, giving you a lot of dramatic latitude. >> mm-hmm. >> did you do that intentionally so that there wouldn't be people saying, he got this wrong? he got that wrong? >> well, it is a bit intimidating because you have to -- the way i make this out there will always be people who know more about all of this than i do. on the other hand, that is not really my job. my job is as a storyteller and an empathetic writer to bring mary lincoln and that time in her life to vivid life for an audience. but i have to say after doing the first play "the heavens were hung in black" where there was so much available to me about lincoln. you can read for the rest of your life. but with mary, it was a different experience, and i -- i did appreciate having a little bit of room to do my own imagining about her. >> so what was your source of information? you found these small notations. but what was the historical research that went into your crafting of the story? >> sure. my style with a period piece like this is to start very specificly with things that were written in the time. rather than starting with things that are 21st century lens looking back. because in a certain way, those wonderful writers many of them scholars and historians are doing exactly what i'm doing, they're looking at sources, and creating a lens through which to tell that story. rather than cheat so obviously and take them at their word, what they made of mary lincoln, i went back -- some things, of course newspapers of the day. you can read all of those newspapers of the day. there are many books that were published right after lincoln's death. many people wanted to jump on that bandwagon and join the many who thought they had something original to say about lincoln. some of them, not very many but some wrote a tiny bit about mary. she was often not in any of those books. that was interesting. that was a big clue to me as well. is how often she is missing from the story of lincoln. one thing that i found very interesting is i went back and i found about maybe seven or eight plays that had been written right after the assassination about lincoln. just reading how they treated the story of the civil war, in some ways mary lincoln, abraham lincoln, some of the plays were wild. much wilder than anything i could write. so that kind of liberated me, as well, because i realized there were writers 150 years ago trying to make sense of this time in a theatrical language, as well. so that was freeing. then i started to read books that were written in the 20th century. carl sandberg wrote a beautiful, small, slim volume. and he was part of the new wave of writers who were starting to reconsider the image and representation of mary lincoln. maybe she had gotten a bad deal in terms of -- because for about 50 years after lincoln's death there was so much negative that was written about her. i started to find some of the things that, if not positive, at least were looking at, maybe there are two sides to this. there was enough source material that i felt like i could find interesting things. >> what was the time from, yes, i have this commissioned, to the opening debut? how much time is involved in all this? >> i would say it was about three years, maybe. that i had. so i really spent a solid year researching. i went back to springfield, illinois, to the presidential museum there. i went to lexington to the todd house. i also spent time with one of the largest private collectors of lincoln memorabilia in los angeles, louis taper and she was able to let me you know look firsthand at some of mary's -- mary lincoln's, you know, her comb her bible, her gloves -- the gloves that she wore at the inauguration. that was incredibly moving to me. >> how many players are in your play? >> there are eight actors who play a variety of characters. >> are all the characters historically accurate? or do you take some license with them? were all of them known to have gone in to that room during that time? >> oh, no, no. >> but they all existed? >> they are. queen victoria is in the play. she wrote a letter to mary lincoln that was very famous and she appears to mary in the form of that letter. but in three dimension. laura keen the actress in "our american cousin" -- >> whose play it was. >> whose play was at ford's, "our american cousin" that was being acted when the terrible thing -- terrible tragedy happened onstage. and the fact that laura keen and mary lincoln were linked forever by that event. i was very intrigued by those two women and what they might have to say to each other. >> side bar question. after the tragedy happened here was her play ever produced again? >> oh, yes. that play was the most produced play in the country and there were many versions of it. in fact, they were booked to do a performance two days later and she went to cincinnati to do it but she was brought back to washington because they were all suspects. but yeah, she continued. >> so mary bacon how did you get involved with this project? >> well i am -- i did a premiere -- well premiere of james' play of called "iron kisses." i can't remember how many years ago. but i knew -- i knew him. and then so when the audition came up, just knowing the writer and that it's a new play of his, that makes you interested immediately. if you liked him. and you believe in their voice and the strength of their plays. also, for me, my late mother-in-law, my husband's mother was a really wonderful woman. judy lindsay. i should say her name. she was in new york city. she went to the theater, she read everything. she read every -- and she was also trying her hand at playwrighting, after a career in journalism, working at columbia university, and cpj. and she was actually writing a play about mary lincoln. and i never got to talk to her about it because she died unexpected ly about four years ago. it was really creepy that when this came up, i felt obligated to explore. that was -- it did make me pause and think, well what was she so taken with? she herself experienced the death of her first husband, untimely death of her first husband, at the age of 36, and then the untimely death of her second husband at the age of -- when he was 62. she was married to her first husband one year longer than her second husband. i thought maybe it was the grief that she went through that was something she was interested in. although i do not know judy. i do not know. but she was very taken with mary todd lincoln. and then, you know, you do an audition and you get it up on its feet. because the way james is writing, it reads like poetry. and this is a very poetic play. i think, if i may say so, he's writing about -- he's writing -- he's writing people's feelings. mary is putting her feelings into words. which is poetic. and the way it's -- i've said this to him a million times, it was beautifully written. so i wanted to feel how it felt as a drama. you know as drama. up on my feet. and sometimes i don't know that until i'm up on my feet in an audition. wow, this really works. and that of course was intriguing. those are the two things i brought to it, my prior experience with james and then also -- >> is this your first historical character? >> oh, my gosh. i'm sure there's best known historical characters you've ever played. >> and again the people have opinions and they've read a lot. how did you, how did you prepare yourself to play this role? >> well i started then i found my mother-in-law's you know, we pulled out a box of her stuff and she had like four biographies, so i just started looking at them, then i found that biographers really have a hard time keeping their own opinion out of it. that was really clear when i would read about the same event from two different perspectives. then i researched biographies and tried to discern which ones i felt were going to be more even handed, i guess. which ones appealed to me me more and so, i did that, then i read what was basically, what you could look up on the internet and i rewatched lincoln because i think sally field did her a great service. i think it was very bright, who was emotional, but to me, what i loved about her portrayal is that she had a reason for behaving the way she did when she had a fit to get her husband to do something or to do something, to change something. it's not just being emotional. i liked that a lot. so, i just took from all these different places and then, but actually, playing the role, i will tell you, i haven't had to work that hard in terms of like i have freed myself completely and i guess i do as an actor, but completely of trying to be like mary lincoln. i've never been told to try to look like her. i don't look anything like her. we have brown hair but body type completely different. and that's not been the focus. i think what your previous play, when you're playing lincoln, you have to look like lincoln. you have to approximate some semblance because you know, but mary todd lincoln had a very distinlgts look and that's not been part of this. but what i want to say about james' play, what i feel like i have to do is really live in the text because it's all there for me. in terms of like creating a character, i'm not creating one and then putting it on top of the words i've been given to say. i think they just, it's evident if i just say those words and experience as truthfully as i can. she just emerges, her character, which i would -- >> how was she when the assassination happened? >> 47. >> and it's, this is a question for both of you in terms of ininterpreterin ination. it's almost unbelievable sitting and watching a play then your spouse would be shot dead. how do you even understand what kind of emotion people would go through, experiencing that and then how do you translate it both in what you wrote and what you're producing on the stage? >> well, i guess starting with me that was a very big clue to me. when you think you know you're holding your loved one's hand in the moment before he's killed. it's not hard to imagine how traumatic that would be. that is is a way in for me to at least have empathy for mary lincoln. i may not understand everything she did. i may not agree with it. the play doesn't try to make her out to be nicer than she really was. and i don't have an ax to grind. i didn't come into this with an agenda of i want to set the record straight about mary lincoln. i really wanted to tell the story about this incredibly smart, savvy political mother and wife. who witnessed her husband's death. and the, what she might have gone through to try to get on with her life. and part of the tragedy with mary lincoln of course is that my play is focused on these 40 days, but as most of us know yes, she left that white house, but you know, her life didn't get better in many ways, it became even more challenging. so, that also meant the play isn't about you know at the end, okay the sun comes out and you know, everything's fine. she leaves the room and that is something. that is a step in her life. but it's, it's not over. it's not an easy one. so, i think how to do that on stage, how to create that, it's terrifying. very terrifying to write. it was hard. to live with. because i felt like it was my obligation to take that on. as somebody who had to do what i knew, an actor and eventually mary would do, which would be to live that three dimensionally. we were talking earlier about that wonderful hand off that happen happens between a writer and an actor and we're in that process right now. really where i'm handing this off and she is mary linkcolnlincoln. it's not my mary lincoln now, it's hers. so i'll let you talk about taking the baton, how you do that. >> well, how do you do that? how do you create a traumatic experience on stage? well, it's specifically, this is one because i mean, to imagine living through that, how you capture that without ever experiencing something that horrific in your own life? >> well, as an actor i will say that any actor, a good actor can portray anything that can happen to a human being. >> so i'm asking for the secret to the actor's craft. >> i think everyone probably goes about it in a different way. when i was younger, it was about, oh, trying to recreate. i've been through more tragedy since then and more death and grief. i'm not as surprised by tragic events, you know. >> was it different when you put the costumes on? >> it was painful. yes. yes and no. there's a really hard time when you leave the rehearsal room. you've created everything with the rehearsal props you have a relationship to that skirt. and you've put a lot of emotional investment into it so it can be very jarring, actually. but now that we're here and we're in the actual clothes, it's been helpful because it's just how i'm starting to have dreams about being in this time period, you know. >> i feel very emotional watching them in costume because there's something about that silhouette that historical silhouette. especially in terms of what women wore then. it's not something i think about all the time but all of a sudden seeing it again, it's haunting. >> the restriction is the restriction is really, because i think one thing -- >> restriction of the cory set? >> of the clothes. it's the corset, but also the weight of those clothes. they were so heavy. and women, you couldn't move very much and then you're so weighed down and then how you can move is limiting. >> so very instructive about how women were confined physically and -- as a result. >> absolutely. >> in so many ways. >> that's one of the things the play is about, victoria, how, what that, how menacing that was for a woman like mary lincoln who was educated and smart. >> it makes me admire her all the more for working with what she had. how she did make herself look beautiful and knowing to put flowers in her hair. she just, she worked it. and i really have a great admiration for that now because i can see how what the challenges were. >> this play will be staged, is staged for a short period of time for the anniversary. what happens to it after this? it's a special project for a special ooempbt in time, but what might the future be? >> i wish i knew. i mean, as a writer, and a theatre, i always everything i write, i have to imagine how it will have a life beyond its first production and i have to say all of my plays have. i hope this one is no different. obviously, this is a very special production. of this play. but this play can be done and hopefully, will be done at other theatres who don't have this firsthand relationship with the event, but you know, it's a big country. and a lot of people have a lot of feeling about mary lincoln. i saw the heavens are turning black in springfield, illinois at the museum done by local actors. and i was so moved because i didn't know until i saw it in springfield how often the word, springfield, came up in that play and suddenly, i was sitting with all these townspeople in springfield watching a play that was really about springfield. when it was here, it was about washington, so i think that's just, it will find, hopefully, it's homes in different places to people. >> so ultimate lyly, for people who common experience the play, what do you want to leave them with? what is the ultimate message of this play for them? >> i'm, i will list sounding coy here but i've kind of given up on the idea that i can even wish that. what i do hope is that knowing that many many people have big opinions about mary lincoln that i hope the play will at least engage those opinions and if not change them for a couple of hours they might consider who mary lincoln was. might have been. and maybe look at her a little differently. >> and are there universal messages in the play? >> absolutely. >> what would those be? >> i think grief is a process. grief is both very private and very public. and there, no one can do it for you. that you have to go through that. and as mary said, mary lincoln did it on her own terms and that didn't please a lot of people. that she did it on her own terms and i think there's a message in this as well. that sometimes you have to do it. >> and a very big sense. she basically said country, i'm going to do this my own way. i don't care that the president needs to come into the white house. i guess really we'll close with the same question for you. you absorbed this character in learning how to portray her on stage. what do you want people to take away from your performance? >> i was going to say this earlier. what i think one thing about playing this role i have just imagined being a woman in this set of circumstances. and i think that in some ways i hope that people will see just i don't want to say an ordinary person, not that she was ordinary, but just like a person. going through these circumstances. that all women, you know, all women go through groef. women whose who lose their husbands, who's a main source of, was their world. how many women or men have to pick up and build their identity without someone who and i think for mary lincoln, her entire identity was based in lincoln. >> no pension after he died. >> right. and then you know that's victorian time like what was available to her to do? if she could have found something to do, i think she would have had a easier time, but women at, she talks a lot about being the widow, the quiet, charming widow and what your options are are. so, i'm hoping they'll take away a sense of the massageny of the time, which has a lot to do with how she was preperceived in that time. now, we don't, we have never questioned that a woman needs to grieve or how she's behaving. it makes complete sense and to me playing it it's always made complete sense. it's very rational to me how she behaves in this play and i'm hoping they'll take that away with them. >> there's a moment in the play where she says very sincerely, what's to become of me? that's a genuine question for mary lincoln in this moment and i think it's a universal question we all feel in those moments of intense loss and groef. what is to become of me? what am i going to do? where will i go? will i love? so, i feel like those are universal things. >> well, thanks to both of you. the play wright and the actor of mary lincoln portraying mary lincoln in the widow lincoln. thank you for your time. >> thank you, susan. you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on cspan 3. follow us on twitter at cspan history. for information on our schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. this april marks the 150th anniversary of lincoln's assassination. up next, theatre historian thomas bogar revisits that night through official testimony of some of the actors and employees of the ford brothers. this event was hosted by the national archives and lasts about an hour. >> it's funny when you start out to work on a book about something so well known in american history, such a signal event, you have to really aim for who you think your readers are going to be. i started to find early that there's such a spectrum. on one end you have people who are real scholars of the lincoln assassination, who are familiar with the most arcane details. and then you have on the other end what was exemplified by my visit recently to a city that will remain nameless. when i was doing research on the book, i was having dinner in that city in a fine upscale restaurant. and the manager of the restaurant, a young woman in her 30s, came by and said -- asked me what brought me to the city. when i explained that i was doing research about the lincoln assassination she looked at me blankly for a minute and then said, "lincoln was assassinated?" so i have to aim somewhere in there. with the book, and today i'm going to try to aim more toward the former category than the latter. i found that as much as history is understood in a timeline or in specific people, it's really the context that explains the significance of it.

Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Widow Lincoln Interview 20150217

morning across the street and we know that the country went into mourning. but in that earlier play in my research in that time i had really become attached. and that president lincoln himself would not really be a character. although, of course, he looms large in the play. playwright do it, tell us what the play is all about. so people understand what we're talking about. >> what is the play about? the play is about the period of time that mary lincoln spent in the white house right after he was shot. because she holed herself up in a room that she had not spent barely any time in for close to six weeks, 40 days, and did not leave. even though johnson was waiting to move in with his family and start running the country from the white house. and that's how she dealt with it. how she dealt with her grief. and that's what it's about. and everything that's happening in the country while she's there, and it's -- i guess it's about a woman's insistence on mourning in her own way. >> did the ford's people immediately like the idea when you said there will be no lincoln in our anniversary play? >> you know, to the producer's credit i would say he took about one second and said, yeah, we'll do that. and so i think, you know, they know my work very well and they know how seriously i approach the subject. i think that paul and his colleagues were taken by the mystery of this. and it's really an untold story. there's very little written about it. i mean i discovered it was really a footnote in a book, an article, something, and i thought, surely someone has written extensively about that time. and of course one of the reasons historians haven't is that we don't know what happened. there's very little. mary herself only wrote about it in one surviving letter. and it's really a paragraph in which she describes the agony of it. but she doesn't talk about it in detail. her dressmaker, elizabeth keckley who was her companion during that time talks about it a little bit in her book. but that's it. so, you can imagine for me as a dramatist there was a lot to imagine. >> does the room in the white house she was holed up in still exist? >> that's a great question. it was on the second floor. i'm sure in some version it exists. it was a room when mary was brought back to the white house the next morning after the president died, she wouldn't go in to any of the rooms where she had any associated memories. so her own bedroom. any of the rooms. she found herself in this particular room, which was a small room. it was in the living quarters in the second floor, that had been appointed to be sort of a writing room for lincoln for the summer. and she went in and wouldn't leave. >> before we get to that part of the story, isn't it true that while lincoln was dying across the street from where we were, i don't know if this was victorian mores or what but they would not let her be with her husband? they took her out of the room? >> she was in a room right next door. they didn't tell her he was dying. like, she knew it was grave. but they didn't tell her -- she talks about that. that -- that you know, that's in catherine clinton's book right after they announced his death to her. why didn't anyone tell me that he was dying? that he was at his last, you know, his last breaths. which you can, you know, you can tell when someone is in that stage. so, yeah, was it stanton who banished her from the room, in our play. in james' play banished her from the room. >> because she was weeping and wailing woman, right? >> because she was weeping and upset. >> she would come in periodically and, you know, collapse in panic, anxiety, grief. and they would shovel her out. and you know, it was this room right next door. i would say in the play that's quite an event in the play. the fact that she was kept out. because there was a southern tradition of being with that dying person for the wife, you know, to be there with that in the last moments with your beloved. and the fact that she was denied that was just one more thing that i think mary lincoln felt, in my play i'm talking about, felt, you know, that other people were taking control over her. and so it's quite an event in the play. because i had found a report that one of the attending doctors to lincoln kept a little notebook of his pulse all through the night. and it just was these numbers. and so in the play, interspersed with mary's desire to be with her husband during those moments. >> you and i had a chance to talk before we started recording this about acknowledging all of the genuine lincoln scholars, and all of the lincoln wanna-be scholars there are in the country. so so many people know a great deal about lincoln's life. and yet, you chose a period where very little is known, giving you a lot of dramatic latitude. >> mm-hmm. >> did you do that intentionally so that there wouldn't be people saying, he got this wrong? he got that wrong? >> well, it is a bit intimidating because you have to -- the way i make this out there will always be people who know more about all of this than i do. on the other hand, that is not really my job. my job is as a storyteller and an empathetic writer to bring mary lincoln and that time in her life to vivid life for an audience. but i have to say after doing the first play "the heavens were hung in black" where there was so much available to me about lincoln. you can read for the rest of your life. but with mary, it was a different experience, and i -- i did appreciate having a little bit of room to do my own imagining about her. >> so what was your source of information? you found these small notations. but what was the historical research that went into your crafting of the story? >> sure. my style with a period piece like this is to start very specificly with things that were written in the time. rather than starting with things that are 21st century lens looking back. because in a certain way, those wonderful writers, many of them scholars and historians, are doing exactly what i'm doing, they're looking at sources, and creating a lens through which to tell that story. rather than cheat so obviously and take them at their word, what they made of mary lincoln, i went back -- some things, of course newspapers of the day. you can read all of those newspapers of the day. there are many books that were published right after lincoln's death. many people wanted to jump on that bandwagon and join the many who thought they had something original to say about lincoln. some of them, not very many, but some wrote a tiny bit about mary. she was often not in any of those books. that was interesting. that was a big clue to me, as well. is how often she is missing from the story of lincoln. one thing that i found very interesting is i went back and i found about maybe seven or eight plays that had been written right after the assassination about lincoln. just reading how they treated the story of the civil war, in some ways mary lincoln, abraham lincoln, some of the plays were wild. much wilder than anything i could write. so that kind of liberated me, as well, because i realized there were writers 150 years ago trying to make sense of this time in a theatrical language, as well. so that was freeing. then i started to read books that were written in the 20th century. carl sandberg wrote a beautiful, small, slim volume. and he was part of the new wave of writers who were starting to reconsider the image and representation of mary lincoln. maybe she had gotten a bad deal in terms of -- because for about 50 years after lincoln's death there was so much negative that was written about her. i started to find some of the things that, if not positive, at least were looking at, maybe there are two sides to this. there was enough source material that i felt like i could find interesting things. >> what was the time from, yes, i have this commissioned, to the opening debut? how much time is involved in all this? >> i would say it was about three years, maybe. that i had. so i really spent a solid year researching. i went back to springfield, illinois, to the presidential museum there. i went to lexington to the todd house. i also spent time with one of the largest private collectors of lincoln memorabilia in los angeles, louis taper and she was able to let me, you know, look firsthand at some of mary's -- mary lincoln's, you know, her comb, her bible, her gloves -- the gloves that she wore at the inauguration. that was incredibly moving to me. >> how many players are in your play? >> there are eight actors who play a variety of characters. >> are all the characters historically accurate? or do you take some license with them? were all of them known to have gone in to that room during that time? >> oh, no, no. >> but they all existed? >> they are. queen victoria is in the play. she wrote a letter to mary lincoln that was very famous and she appears to mary in the form of that letter. but in three dimension. laura keen the actress in "our american cousin" -- >> whose play it was. >> whose play was at ford's, "our american cousin" that was being acted when the terrible thing -- terrible tragedy happened onstage. and the fact that laura keen and mary lincoln were linked forever by that event. i was very intrigued by those two women and what they might have to say to each other. >> side bar question. after the tragedy happened here was her play ever produced again? >> oh, yes. that play was the most produced play in the country and there were many versions of it. in fact, they were booked to do a performance two days later and she went to cincinnati to do it, but she was brought back to washington because they were all suspects. but yeah, she continued. >> so mary bacon, how did you get involved with this project? >> well, i am -- i did a premiere -- well premiere of james' play of called "iron kisses." i can't remember how many years ago. but i knew -- i knew him. and then so when the audition came up, just knowing the writer, and that it's a new play of his, that makes you interested immediately. if you liked him. and you believe in their voice, and the strength of their plays. also, for me, my late mother-in-law, my husband's mother was a really wonderful woman. judy lindsay. i should say her name. she was in new york city. she went to the theater, she read everything. she read every -- and she was also trying her hand at playwrighting, after a career in journalism, working at columbia university, and cpj. and she was actually writing a play about mary lincoln. and i never got to talk to her about it because she died unexpected ly about four years ago. it was really creepy that when this came up, i felt obligated to explore. that was -- it did make me pause and think, well what was she so taken with? she herself experienced the death of her first husband, untimely death of her first husband, at the age of 36, and then the untimely death of her second husband at the age of -- when he was 62. she was married to her first husband one year longer than her second husband. i thought maybe it was the grief that she went through that was something she was interested in. although i do not know, judy. i do not know. but she was very taken with mary todd lincoln. and then, you know, you do an audition and you get it up on its feet. because the way james is writing, it reads like poetry. and this is a very poetic play. i think, if i may say so, he's writing about -- he's writing -- he's writing people's feelings. mary is putting her feelings into words. which is poetic. and the way it's -- i've said this to him a million times, it was beautifully written. so i wanted to feel how it felt as a drama. you know, as drama. up on my feet. and sometimes i don't know that until i'm up on my feet in an audition. wow, this really works. and that, of course, was intriguing. those are the two things i brought to it, my prior experience with james and then i may not agree with it. the play doesn't try to make her out to be nicer than she really was. and i don't have an axe to grind. i didn't come in with an agenda. i really wanted to tell the story about this incredibly smart, savvy political mother and wife who witnessed her husband's death. and the -- what she might have gone through to try to get on with her life. and part of the tragedy with mary lincoln of course is that my play is focused on these 40 days. as most of us know yes, she left that white house but her life didn't get better. in many ways, it became even more challenging. that also meant the play isn't about -- at the end okay, the sun comes out and everything's fine. she leaves the room and that is something. that is a step in -- in her life. but it's -- it's not over. it's not an easy one. so i think how to do that on stage, how to create that it's terrifying, you know. it was very terrifying to write. it was hard to live with because it felt like it was my obligation to take that on as somebody who had to do what i knew, an actor and eventually mary would do to live that three dimensionally. i wanted to do it as fully as i can. we were talking about that wonderful handoff that happens between a writer and an actor. we're in that process right now where i'm handing this off and she is mary lincoln. it's not my mary lincoln now. it's hers. i'll let you talk about how you do that. >> well -- how do you do that? how do you create a traumatic experience on stage. >> specifically this one. because i mean to imagine living through that. how do you capture that without ever experiencing something that horrific in your own line? >> as an actor, i will say that any actor -- a good actor can portray anything that can happen to the human being. >> so i'm asking for the secret to the actor's craft. >> yeah. i think everyone goes about it a different way. i've been through more tragedy since then and more death and grief. i'm not as surprised by tragic events, you know. >> was it different when you put the costumes on? >> it was painful. >> was it? >> yes. yes and -- yes and no. there's a really hard time when you leave the rehearsal room. you've created everything with the -- you have a relationship to that skirt and you've put a lot of emotional investment into it. so it can be very jarring, actually. now that we're here and we're in the actual clothes, it's been helpful because it's just -- i'm starting to have dreams about being in this time period you know. >> i feel very emotional watching them in costume. there's something about that silhouette that historical silhouette in terms of what women wore then. you know it's not something i think about all the time, but all of a sudden seeing it again three dimensionally, it's haunting. >> the restriction is really -- because i think -- >> restriction of the corset? >> of the clothes. it's also the weight of those clothes. they were so heavy. and women -- you couldn't move very much and then you're so weighed down and then how you can move is limiting. >> uh-huh. so instructive about how women work and find physically -- >> absolutely. >> in so many ways. >> that's one of the things the play is about. about victoria america, how limiting that was for a woman like mary lincoln who was educated and smart. >> it makes me admire her all the more for working with what she had, how she did make herself look beautiful and knowing to put flowers in her hair. she worked it. and i really have a great admiration for that now because i can see how -- how -- what the challenges were. >> this play is staged for a short period of time for the anniversary. what happens to it after this? it's a special project for a special event in time but what will its future be? >> i wish i knew. i mean, as a writer in the theater, i always -- everything i write, i have to imagine and hope it will have a life beyond its first production. i have to say all of my plays have. i hope this one is no different. obviously, this is a very special production of this play. but this play can be done and hopefully will be done at other theaters who don't have this first-hand relationship with the event. but, you know, it's a big country and a lot of people have a lot of feeling about mary lincoln. i saw the he vens in springfield, illinois, done by local actors. and i was so moved because i didn't know until i saw it in springfield how often the word springfield came up in that play. suddenly, i was watching a play with them that was really about springfield. when it was here, it was about washington. it will find hopefully its home in different places to people. >> so ultimately for people who come and experience the play, what do you want to leave them with? what is the ultimate message of this play for them? >> i -- i will risk sounding coy here. i have kind of given up on the idea that i can even wish that. what i do hope is that knowing that many people have big opinions about mary lincoln, that i hope the play will at least engage those opinions and if not change them for a couple of hours they might consider who mary lincoln was, might have been, and maybe look at her a little differently. >> are there universal messages in the play? >> absolutely. >> what do you hope they would be? >> i think that grief is a process. grief is both very private and very public. and there -- no one can do it for you that you have to go through that. and as mary said mary lincoln did it on her own terms. that didn't please a lot of people, that she did it on her own terms. i think there's a message in there as well that sometimes you have to do it. >> and a very -- she basically said, country, i'm going to do it my own way, i don't care that the president needs to come into the white house. we'll close with the same question for you. you absorbed this character in learning how to portray her on stage. what do you want people to take away from your performance? >> i was going to say this earlier. one thing about playing this role i have just imagined being a woman in this set of circumstances. and i think that in some ways, i hope people will see -- i don't want to say an ordinary person not that she was ordinary but just a person going through these circumstances. that all women -- you know, all women go through grief women who lose their husbands whose main source of -- was their world, how many women have to pick up or men have to pick up and build their identity without someone who -- and i think for mary lincoln who her entire identity was based in abraham lincoln. >> and financial resources right? no pension after he died. >> that's victorian time what was available for her to do. if she could have found something to do i think she would have had an easier time. she talks a lot about being the widow, the quiet charming widow and what your options are. i'm hoping they'll take away a sense of the massageisogyny of the time. now, we would never question that a woman needs to grieve or how she's behaving. to me playing has always made complete sense it's rational to me how she behaves in this play. i'm hoping they'll take that away with them. >> there's a moment where she says, what's to become of me. that's a genuine question for mary lincoln in this moment. i think it's a universal question we all feel in those moments of intense loss and grief. what am i going to do, where will i go, will i love. so i feel like those are universal things. >> who am i. >> thanks to both of you, the play write and the actor of mary lincoln. thank you for your time. this week while congress is in recess book tv and american history tv are in prime time. beginning tuesday night at 8:00 eastern. featuring programs like topics like the war on terror with the report on torture and the guantanamo diary. on wednesday, it's world affairs talking about china's secret plan to replace america as a super power and the emerging crisis in europe. on thursday, politics in the white house with david axle rod and mike huckabee. then on friday a look at pakistan through the eyes of a woman raised in karachi. and on tuesday night at 8:00 interviews with former korean pows. on wednesday, the 100th anniversary of the release of the film "the birth of a nation." the showing of the film, followed by a reair of our call-in program. and thursdays, historians debate the social changes of the 1970s. friday japanese american interment during world war ii. this week in prime time. when president lincoln was shot on april 14th 1865 he was wearing a black great coat made especially for his second inauguration. the coat is cared for by the national park service and was on display in the lobby of ford's theater in 2011. currently, the coat is located in a storage facility for stabilization because of its fragility. it will be on display again in an exhibit at the theater to commemorate the 159th anniversary of lincoln's assassination. we visit ford's theater when the great coat was on display in february of 2011. american history tv documented the process of removing a replica coat and placing the original coat on display for the public and learn how the artifact is preserved for future generations. >> yeah -- >> she's our official -- >> so as you can see, this is the box that holds the greatcoat. and we are just about ready to put it in its special display case. we have a special storage area that we keep the greatcoat for half the year. and we have it on display in february through the summer. so we put it up right around the time of lincoln's birthday which is this saturday, the 12th. then we have it up during our busiest season, the spring season. that's also the time of april when the assassination anniversary comes around,

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Men Are Quietly Erasing America's True Daughters Of The Revolution

America's Daughters Of The Revolution Are Being Quietly Erased

Once again, a space women created in response to male exclusion is being taken away — this time the Daughters of the American Revolution.