One-hundred-and-sixty years after the dastardly deed, you think you know the entire story of Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. But it turns out you don’t.
In “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only,” now playing through June 22 at Baltimore Center Stage, we’re offered some secret Booth family lineage. It turns out Lincoln’s Maryland-born assassin is descended from 18th Jews who, long before that evening at Ford’s Theatre, changed their last name and, for full reinvention, their religion.
Who knew?
But there’s a bigger surprise here. Yes, Lincoln still gets a bullet in the back of the head. But who knew, after all this time, that the story could still offer fresh insights into Booth and do it with a combination of naked confession and sneaky comedy?
The script comes from Matthew Weiner, who was born and raised in the Baltimore area and went to The Park School of Baltimore. Weiner is a nine-time Emmy Award winner who created and wrote “Mad Men” and helped write “The Sopranos.”
The Center Stage cast is uniformly terrific, especially Ben Ahlers and Robbie Tann, who play the Booth brothers. Ahlers, as John Wilkes Booth, is first comically charming as he invites us into his madness, and powerful in his dramatic moments. Tann is thunderously dramatic as Edwin Booth.
What Weiner has crafted here is a kind of play within a play. Booth is practically rehearsing for his big moment in history. He’s half out of his mind, of course. He’s a racist, he’s full of grandiosity, and he think he’s doing the country a big favor.
Or as he puts it in the play’s most chilling line, he’s giving America a “gift” just as the Civil War is finally breathing its last. When he’s done with Lincoln, Booth says, he’ll leave us with a war that never ends.
In the age of Trump, with the shadow of race inspiring so many White House outrages, the real Booth in his unmarked grave over at Baltimore’s historic Green Mount Cemetery must hear such words as a valedictory speech.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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