Mary Bacon as Mary Lincoln: No Lady Macbeth

Actress Mary Bacon, her husband Andrew Leynse and their young son live in New York near Columbia University. Leynse is artistic director of Primary Stages, an Off-Broadway company that stages new plays by both established and emerging playwrights. Bacon, a veteran of stage, screen and television, frequently performs there.

And yet, here she is, in effect making her Washington debut. “The Widow Lincoln” opens at Ford’s Theatre Jan. 23 and runs through Feb. 22. In a landmark Washington theatre, Bacon will play Mary Todd Lincoln, an iconic figure of historic Washington.
“I don’t know why I haven’t performed here,” she said. “This city has quite a lot of theater to offer – what with Arena, or Ford’s and all the others. It just never happened.”

She has been in some ways in thrall to her experience here. “When you step into this theatre, and there’s the box where he was killed, in this place, and we are doing this play here, well, it just really affects you. That’s not the kind of experience you have in New York. It makes everything more vivid, every moment.”

Bacon remembers her mother-in-law having a strong interest in Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. And there’s the issue of grief.

“I think this is a play about grief, how to handle it, what to do with it, recognizing it.”
Having lost both her parents within a space of eight years, Bacon knows a bit about grief.

“It’s always about coping, about loss,” she said. “Nobody is truly ready for the death of a loved one. So if you can find a personal place, an experience, it helps with this part.

“It’s usually about the playwright for me, the voice. I know James Still and we’ve worked with him. I trust his voice. It’s all about character and words and trusting the script, the play.”

Unusually, this is a play with an all-female cast. Bacon explained that there are “a number of characters who are essentially generic widows, women who speak with her, who have lost sons and husbands in the war. It’s a mechanism for coping. There is also Elizabeth Keckley, her seamstress in the White House, a free black woman and highly successful businesswoman.”

And at the center of it all is the Widow Lincoln. “There was always all this talk – she’s some sort of Lady Macbeth, a power monger, power behind the throne, she was hysterical or a spendthrift,” said Bacon. “But I think she was quite a presence in the White House. And as far as the marriage goes, well, that was a marriage that was in so many ways highly unusual for the time. It was a partnership, I think, in every sense of the word. It was volatile, often, but the presidency was a shared experience. ‘We have won,’ he wired Mary after his victory. Not I, but we.

“You have to consider all of her various facets: she was a Southerner, she was a lady, very much so, she was extremely intelligent. And I think they shared everything. She was very well educated. And she was, it was clear, frustrated. She saw something in Lincoln, his ambitions, his talents and his gifts. She was, after all, courted by Stephen Douglas.”

Mary Todd Lincoln was also quite the dresser, apparently. There are pictures of Bacon dressed in black, in the big gowns and clothes of the times.

“It’s very difficult to move comfortably in those dresses. It takes some getting used to,” she said. “I’ve done period pieces here and there on stage and film, but this really gives you an idea of how women were treated and lived in those days. There’s the hoops, all those layers and buttons, it’s very restrictive. Men’s clothing was not inhibited at all in that sense.”

She points out that it was not just the clothes that were restrictive and inhibiting. “Men, the officials, ran the state funeral and that journey to Springfield. She did not participate. Wives weren’t expected to participate in funerals for fear that they might get too emotional.”

You get the feeling that Bacon intends to get Mary Todd Lincoln right, and to do right by her.