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| Julie Harris. |
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| Julie Harris, Brian Farrell, Leora Dana, Kate Wilkinson. |
The Last of Mrs.
Lincoln was an old-fashioned vehicle for star Julie Harris in which she portrayed the wife of the 16th president during the 17 years
following his assassination. This allowed her the opportunity to demonstrate
Mary Todd Lincoln’s aging process through makeup and demeanor. James Prideaux’s
approach to dramatizing Mrs. Lincoln, a woman generally believed to have been a
nagging, neurotic, was to reveal the less well-known, but pleasanter, aspects
of her personality, as well as her unfairly exaggerated faults.
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| Julie Harris. |
Complimentary comments came from Clive Barnes,
who recognized the problems of the drama's “episodic” and “patchy” construction, but
valued its “spotlit moments of valid melodrama,” and called it “a respectable
example of its genre.” Brendan Gill was even more approbatory. To him this was
a superior soap opera “with good acting parts.” Both critics enjoyed the staging
of George Schaefer. John Simon, however, was one of many who loathed the play,
terming it “crassly commercial, slick without being clever, dramatically and
humanly dishonest, [and] lacking in any kind of talent except for cutting and
pasting.”
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| Julie Harris, David Rounds. |
Simon also abhorred the performance of Julie Harris, one of Broadway’s
most revered artists, who received accolades from his colleagues. He thought
her “monotonous” and “with a certain pious self-righteousness . . . that may
suit the character but hardly heightens her stature.” However, most agreed with
Barnes, who noticed how “she grows with her story and quite dominates the play,
as she must. There is a real woman here—a little theatrical, softly flamboyant—and
yet lovable and moving.”
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| Julie Harris. |
Of the other respected performances, David Rounds’s Robert
Lincoln and Leora Dana’s Elizabeth Edwards were among the most widely
mentioned. Other notables involved included Maureen Anderman, Ralph Clanton,
and Kate Wilkinson.
A Drama Desk Award went to James Prideaux as Most Promising
Playwright, and another to Julie Harris for Outstanding Performance; she also
won an Outer Circle Award. Leora Dana snared a Tony as Best Supporting Actress,
Play, and Brian Farrell, who played Lewis Baker, was given a Theatre World
Award.
