- L to R: ERIK HEGER as Edwin Booth and MARGARET COPELAND as Mary Devlin Booth
Set designer Steven Capone’s neatly, carefully built askew setting, furnished with handsome, unmatched pieces, which might well have belonged in the dressing room of a theatrical star of the mid nineteenth century, tells us enough: it appears we are about to enter the disarranged mind, not the corporeal history, of Edwin Booth, the great Edwin Booth.
We recognize him instantly when he strides on and pauses mid-step, tall, handsome, imposing, his sweeping gestures larger than life. Booth (Erik Heger) does not quite know where he is except that he’s been here before. And with a sinking feeling, we fear we have, too, this very season. It’s odd; madness on stage is almost always familiar; in life, it’s not. That is also true of portrayals of jealousy; we know it instantly when we see it on stage; in life, much more complicated. It would seem, therefore, that the way madness is enacted, the way jealousy is enacted -- both are central to the play –would be the touchstones of the performance. Whereupon playwright Luigi Creatore delves into his theatrical smarts: he gives us and Edwin Booth, a ghost that is at the center of his madness and jealousy, the ghost of his wife, Mary Devlin Booth. And thereby hangs this tale.
Of course, in the 1860’s we are in a very different style of theatrics and how to bridge these 150 years is not only one of director Kim Weild’s major problems, it’s also how to get all her actors on the same page. She and they may get there some day but that is not today. Although the core, of course, is Edwin Booth, since we’re in his mind, it is his baby brother, John Wilkes Booth, who drives the action. Wilkes is very young, callow, full of energy, with two fixations, the first being his adulation of his brother, copying his life on stage and off plus flourishes and excesses as the norm. The other fixation? His utter hatred of President Lincoln he sees as a tyrant, a liar, a fool, the scourge of the country, the power behind the suffering, the agonies of the South. Nothing his brother says can persuade him. He plans to kidnap Lincoln and save the country. Edwin Booth’s other trial is his wife, Mary. He has married her even though she is of the Theater and all actresses are known to be easy women. He has slept with her before their marriage, proof of her easy virtue. Even though she loves him, dotes on him, caters to his every changing mood, he’s had too many women to believe her. It’s easy for him to suspect that Wilkes has bedded her.
Although playwright Creatore has given us Mary haunting Edwin after her untimely death, he does not take advantage of his idea; he gives us pastiches which everyone plays to the hilt, all of them too familiar. (And a fine bit of sword play – with real swords! -- between the brothers suggesting their deeper conflicts). Shakespearean quotations, familiar ones, quirky secondary characters all nicely played by Brian Wallace, but all a losing battle with the history we know and wait for: Wilkes’s murder of the President. The shocking depth of hatred which drives Wilkes is uncomfortably close to the wildly angry political climate of today and the fear generated in us is far from instructive. Perhaps we are not in the mind of Edwin as we believed but in the greater madness in the mind of Wilkes. Perhaps our fear is instructive. In spite of the dominance of Edwin, perhaps this is the core of the play.
Erik Heger as Edwin Booth can tear a passion to tatters, move with consummate grace, dominate the stage but his Booth has no bottom, as the English say; the center of the character remains a cypher to the last, which may be the intention of playwright Creatore. Technically, he and Andrew Veenstra as his baby brother ,John Wilkes, talk fluid but different languages, uncultivated in accent and manner although they are both supposedly part of the Booth dynasty, following in their father’s footsteps. Margaret Copeland as Mary is much more accomplished with, unfortunately, one note to play, which she does very well. Brian Wallace is thoroughly professional. The production is splendidly dressed by costume designer Alixandra Gage Englund, well furnished by designer Capone with apt projections by C. Andrew Bauer, well lit by Charles Foster, well managed throughout. Director Weild has corraled her elements astutely, which is a great step forward to the next stage: to speak intent clearly. It may be important.
Beckett Theater, Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street. Tickets: $50. Student rush $20.212 239-6200. Tue 7 pm, Wed-Sat 8 pm, Mats Sat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm.