Better Angels

You could argue that a fascination with heroes is a retreat in despair from the over- whelming problems of our own time. But I would argue back that in dark times we can use a good hero and might as well go with quality. I think of Lincoln as a gift to us all --  his existence and unlikely career, what he did, said, and wrote, the stories about him that have come down to us. My knowledge of Lincoln had been that of any schoolboy growing up in Los Angeles in the nineteen fifties and sixties. I knew his birthday was February 12, a day we got off from school; he had a funny beard, walked six miles to return two cents, then freed the slaves. And of course, then Ford's Theatre. And there the learning had stopped. The whole impression was fixed, a part of the landscape so familiar I never questioned it -- the good and great man, his penny profile as remote and lifeless as the copper it was stamped on. It was an impression I carried pretty much intact into adulthood, which is to say that as an adult, I looked at Lincoln through the eyes of a child. Somewhere deep in middle age, I started to remedy this defect. When I first read the description of Mrs. Harvey's White House visits in Volume III of Carl Sandburg's The War Years, the tale encapsulated for me everything which was singular about Lincoln's character, particularly his relentless capacity for introspection and change. What made it irresistible was the contrast it provided with George W. Bush's treatment of Cindy Sheehan, who waited in vain outside Bush's Texas ranch in 2005, wanting to ask the president face-to-face why her son had died in Iraq. Being a playwright, I set to work on a play, first by transcribing the dialogue, and soon discovered to my chagrin that once in play format, the Lincoln-Harvey conversations amounted to barely nine pages of script -- hardly long enough for a short one-act, let alone a full-length piece. Nor did the material work on its own as a play exactly. It needed another character, a sort of go-between, to fill in gaps for an audience and serve as host. For this part I enlisted John Hay, Lincoln's secretary. Still more was needed - rounding of character, further layering of theme and plot, more metaphor, more resonance to our own time. I cut, elaborated, stole, invented with abandon. If such liberties were good enough for Shakespeare they were good enough for me. I hope audiences will discover in Better Angels echoes illuminating of our own time. Mainly, though, I hope the play will challenge the vague iconography of "the man on the penny" we've all grown up with, so those who hear it may come away sharing some of my enthusiasm for and curiosity about the remarkable and specific individual who was, to our everlasting credit, our sixteenth president.

-- Wayne Peter Liebman