Word: sherwoods
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Some historical plays, to be sure, are made of sterner stuff and use the past for what it can say to the present. In Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Playwright Sherwood beats the drum for liberal democracy; in Knickerbocker Holiday, the author of High Tor gives comfort to high Tories...
...Lincoln in Illinois (by Robert E. Sherwood; produced by the Playwrights' Company). First production of the five playwrights (Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Robert E. Sherwood) who last season decided to form an independent producing unit, Abe Lincoln in Illinois should see them triumphantly launched. An episodic story of Lincoln from his early Ann Rutledge days to his election as President, it once more demonstrates the magic of the Great Emancipator's personality...
Playwright Sherwood's interpretation is the child of the hour. Psychologically his Lincoln, beautifully played by Canadian-born Actor Raymond Massey, is familiar enough: a salty, sinewy smalltown fellow* cursed with a submerged streak of loneliness and bitterness, plagued by an unsympathetic wife and haunted by an unshakable sense of doom. But Sherwood's chief interest in Lincoln is spiritual, not psychological: it consists of vividly, though not altogether convincingly, tracing Lincoln's growth from an indolent, unambitious "artful dodger" who wanted to be left alone, to a suddenly aroused and embattled champion of human rights...
...Sherwood does not indulge in any awkward sermonizing. Instead, he quotes from Lincoln's own vibrant speeches, particularly the famed "House Divided" one, and lets their message carry forward into the present. Abe Lincoln in Illinois is a frequently inexpert play, slow in getting started, discontinuous in structure, too literary in some of its writing, too emotional in some of its appeal. But it is also a fervent play, burning fiercely with the spirit of what Lincoln, rightly or wrongly, has come to stand for in the hearts of his countrymen...
Toward the last third of the journal, when Homer is in his 40s, he begins reading Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, Hemingway, confesses that his "whole attitude toward literature is undergoing a renascence." When, despite his sobered new outlook, he continues right up to his sudden end to be almost as dumb as ever, most readers will call his story a libel on even the most fatuous of would-be novelists...