Word: lincolnization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lincoln died last night. Mr. Kirstein, Director of the New York City Ballet and sometime poet, has written a new play about Abraham Lincoln that neither strikingly reinterprets history nor forcefully recreates it. And the deadness of the play's language and plot, the absence of mythic word and mythic act keep it a safe distance from being what its subtitle hopes, "a legend after Lincoln...
...before the President's trip to Ford theater. Ann Rutledge, William Herndon, Matthew Brady, Crazy Mary, Drunk Ulysses, dirty stories, trips down the Old Mississippi, unorthodox but deep faith, what he really felt about the Negroes and more and more. Since Kirstein's sole thread of dramatic coherence is Lincoln's growing consciousness that this day is the ordained and necessary day of death, the catalogue of anecdote and reference might be, lamely but legitimately, the drowning man's life passing before his eyes. But Kirstein's dramatic and literary skill isn't enough to carry it off. The scenes...
...audio-visual flurries are imposed on the play and blow up any chance of dramatic development within scenes. They fragment the play and make it painfully obvious that the dialogue is also fragmented--little blips of exposition that are never again used, meaningless historical name-dropping. And the actual Lincoln speeches and quotes from Scripture that come from the loudspeakers when the play has one of its seizures make Kirstein's rhetoric look sick...
Kirstein has Elizabeth Keckley (Nancy McDaniel), the local White House witch accuse Lincoln of "playing with words." And Old Abe's bastard Negro son-valet interrupts Lincoln's speeches for definitions. Lincoln's two secretaries who will write histories talk about history. Characters repeat words for the sake of Meaning. "Till the day I die," says Abe. "The day you die?" say they. "The very day'" says Abe. O ominous, O morbid...
Some 5,000 thieves and arsonists were ravaging the West Side. Williams Drug Store was a charred shell by dusk. More than one grocery collapsed as though made of Lincoln Logs. A paint shop erupted and took the next-door apartment house with it. In many skeletal structures the sole sign of life was a wailing burglar alarm. Lou's Men's Wear expired in a ball of flame. Meantime, a mob of 3,000 took up the torch on the East Side several miles away. The Weather Bureau's tornado watch offered brief hope of rain...