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| Eva Marie Saint, Fred Gwynne. |
THE LINCOLN MASK
[Drama/Biographical/Marriage/Period/Politics] A: V.J. Longhi; D: Gene Frankel;
S: Kert Lundell; C: Patricia Quinn Stuart; L: Thomas Skelton; M: Ezra Laderman;
P: Albert W. Selden and Jerome Minskoff; T: Plymouth Theatre; 10/30/72-11/4/72 (8)
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| Eva Marie Saint, Fred Gwynne. |
Plays about Abraham Lincoln (or his wife) were part of the early 1970s zeitgeist, as witness, for example, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, produced the same season as V.J. Longhi’s The Lincoln Mask, with Julie Harris, and Look Away, with Geraldine Page. The present play began promisingly, with a scene from Our American Cousin being enacted as if the audience were present with Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre the night he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth as he sat in a side box. What followed was a flashback to POTUS’s (Fred Gwynne) presidential career and his relationship with his troubled wife, Mary Todd Lincoln (Eva Marie Saint, still with us at 96 as of this writing).
The distinguished stars, Gwynne and Saint, gave credible
performances but The Lincoln Mask
could not overcome the ennui induced by the playwright’s “almost total lack of
talent and intelligence,” as Brendan Gill asserted, in having concocted what
Clive Barnes dismissed as a “most worthily inconsequential” drama.
The rail splitter’s character, we are told, was inadequately
developed, the material was occasionally inaccurate, and the play, like its
hero, was put to rest.