Arts & Society

Georgetowner • February 12, 2015

Supporters and friends of the SEED School of Washington, D.C. and the SEED Foundation gathered Jan. 21 at the home of Brooke and Gina Coburn to welcome new Head of School, Dr. Adrian Manuel, who brings 14 years of experience working in urban school communities. He was recognized for his exceptional leadership by education expert Rick Hess in the book, “Cage-Busting Leadership.”

Mary Bird •

Alma and John Pat were the hosts of the Jan. 29 literary luncheon co-chaired by Katherine Field Stephen and Willee Lewis. The author of “Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind” spoke of how her discovery of a cache of letters written to her grandfather revealed a love affair torn asunder by Nazi-occupied Austria. On a lighter note, host John Paty told the overflow crowd, “We had to break out the Christmas china.”

Ari Post • February 8, 2015

Vincent van Gogh was a desperate and lonely genius, so the story goes. He had a compulsion visible in all his paintings, thickly built up with coarse and blocky brushwork that layered in hundreds of individually visible strokes, which alludes to an artist both besot by his subject matter and incredibly frustrated with his own interpretations of them. It is an anguish of morbid intrigue, a conflicting lust and discontent for all matters of life and art that points to van Gogh’s calamitous and fabled end. The images he made are so recognizable and his life so notorious that we sometimes forget how awfully damn good of a painter he happened to be.

In its surprisingly modest but scrupulous exhibit, “Van Gogh Repetitions,” the Phillips Collection strives to bring the focus of van Gogh back to his artwork, exploring his painting techniques and habits, whereby he reworked compositions and subjects with a fiery discipline to craft his indelible images. Audiences are privileged to observe how van Gogh borrowed from (and often outright copied) artists he admired, from Paul Gauguin to Jean-Francois Millet, and how he returned time and again to the people and places that so inspired him in order to pursue the rendering of not just their shape and character, but of their essence. Ultimately, we are enabled to judge his paintings on their individual merit, stripped clean of their often-overpowering cultural influence, which only makes us see him again, and for the first time, as the groundbreaking visionary that taught us to see the world in a new light.

In today’s era of third-generation visual glut, it is easy to forget how innovative van Gogh’s style really was; what he saw and put down on canvas was unprecedented. His tendency to over-saturate colors, for instance, with sun-flecked yellow fields and waxy, pulsing blue skies, is something we now readily take for granted. Instagram photo filters owe a lot to the sensibility of van Gogh’s color palette, in a way—anyone can now make an ordinary picture look good by blowing out its colors through preprogrammed filters, all of which end up looking a little bit brighter and richer than what was perhaps ever there in the first place. Van Gogh saw these colors in his mind, and maybe this is his legacy: he taught us to adore and romanticize what has always been there, just so long as we strive to see beyond its surface.

His paintings stand out so well in our cultural consciousness because his paintings are almost memories in themselves, distilled and concentrated explosions of color, light, people and places, that follow a unique visual language at once fresh and familiar. Just the mention of a van Gogh wheat field brings a myriad of images bubbling to the surface. His paintings are, in a word, laconic, like a worthy truism of which we remember its inherent wisdom even if we cannot recall its precise form.

Many of the artist’s most famous works are missing from the exhibit (The Starry Night, Café Terrace at Night, and any self portraits or floral paintings), which opts instead to display lesser known portraits and landscapes. This does not mean that you won’t recognize most of the paintings, and a number of his more famous works indeed made it onto the walls, notably a portrait of his obtusely angled bedroom in Arles in the south of France where he stayed during the summer of 1888. There he was influenced by the strong coastal sunlight, and his work grew brighter in color as he developed his singular and highly recognizable style.

There are multiple canvases devoted to single subjects in the exhibit, which ultimately serves to refocus attention on van Gogh the painter (instead of the cultural icon), and allow an appraisal of his work with fresh eyes. The point herein is not necessarily to judge which of the three is the best version of, say, The Postman Joseph Roulin—a close friend that van Gogh greatly admired—but to watch how van Gogh continually rediscovered and redeveloped his subjects. It is an act of stamina, and one by which many 20th century artists took a lesson. Think of Giacometti’s innumerable portrait busts of his brother Diego, or Willem de Kooning’s Woman series. All these paintings are strong on their own, but seeing them together is like witnessing a religious ritual.

That van Gogh became one of the world’s preeminent artists is indisputable. How he achieved this is less considered, typically passed off as some myth of a beautifully demented mind. But his many studies exhibited in Van Gogh Repetitions point to an artist with exceptional deliberation and methodical attention to detail. Van Gogh’s effortless genius, it seems, came from rigorous and deeply considered observational innovation. It changed our visual lexicon and helped us rediscover the beauty in all that surrounds us, from an aging woman or a grove of poplars, to a vase full of dried up sunflowers.

If there is ever an exhibit of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings in Washington, anyone would be remiss not to see it. With this exhibit in particular, it is a unique opportunity to see what it takes to change the eyes of the world.

“Van Gogh Repetitions” is on view at the Phillips Collection through Jan. 26. For more information, visit www.PhillipsCollection.org

Gary Tischler • February 7, 2015

Simon Shaheen is performing at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue, one of Washington’s more eclectic performance venues, through the auspices of Washington Performing Arts at 8 p.m, Saturday, Feb. 7. 

That won’t tell you much.  Shaheen himself, in a phone interview this week, said there will be his group, five members, playing various instruments.  He is a renowned player of the ‘oud (pronounced “ud”) as well as a classical violinist, and he tells us that the concert is a mixture of traditional Arab instrumental music, along with some recent compositions  of his, as well as duets, singing, the violin.

The promotional material describes him as a man on a mission to incorporate and reflect a history of Arabic music.  He is called a Palestinian ‘oud and violin virtuoso who also goes beyond traditional Arabic music, infusing his compositions with jazz and Western classical styles.

Shaheen is quoted as saying, “I want to create a world music exceptionally satisfying to the ear and for the soul. . . . This is why I selected members of the group who are all virtuosos in their own musical forms, and whose expertise and knowledge can raises the music and the group’s performance to spectacular levels.”

All that tells you a little more.

But there is more, much more to Shaheen, centering around the idea of duality, as he will tell you himself. 

The early life is a thick measure of what duality can be: a Palestinian born in the village of Tarshiha in the Galilee, where he was a member of a musical family—a brother, who lives in New York, as does Shaheen, makes  exquisite ‘ouds, while his father, Hikmad, was a professor of music and a master ‘our player.

“There is no question,” he said, “that my father was the largest influence on my life. It’s almost as if I couldn’t have been anything else but someone who played the ‘oud.”

Shaheen started playing at the age of five, and, to him, it was the music of a large culture that went far back in time and continues into the future.  “Music, and traditions of music, are living things, they are not dead to the touch or the ear, they change.  Music is constantly becoming, adding and subtracting, becoming richer. . . . There is no last word in music. It’s always evolving.”

He studied music at age six at the Conservatory of Western Classical Music in Jerusalem, graduated from the Academy of Music in Jerusalem in 1978 and moved to New York for graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music and music education at Columbia University.

When he came, he stayed and became a U.S. citizen.  Shaheen, too, was constantly adding and subtracting, evolving.

“Obviously, there is a great deal of duality in my life,” he said. “In music, with the pursuit of exploring  and playing traditional Arabic music (with the Near Eastern Music Ensemble), there is the traditional and with the group Qantara, there is the exploration of new forms, jazz and such. 

Shaheen is a Palestinian, a Catholic, an American, who spent his  growing youth in Israel and came to America.   He is a musician, a performer, a composer and an educator.

“You could say there are some dualities there,” he said.  “A few, but they are not separate from one another.   No one is one thing. No music is one thing.  I always get surprised when people focus on religion or some other singular form of identity.   A musician once identified himself to me—he said he was from New York and that he was Jewish.  And I wonder about that, not just this instance but to others.  I am a Catholic, for instance, but that’s not all I am. “

When Shaheen talks about traditional Arab music, he’s talking about the music of daily Arab life, the rituals and common place glories of particular lives and settings—the market, the mosques, the dinner table, the weddings and passings, the local eating establishments, all of which move to music without necessary being musical.

“When I say ‘Arab,’ I mean the worlds closest to the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the old world,”  he said. “I tour all around the world, in the Middle East, I come back to my birthplace every year.  The expectations in today’s audiences in the Middle East is they want to hear traditional music, the way it was played long ago with traditional instruments. They want to hear it as authentic and true.  “

He explores other forms, particularly jazz, world jazz, which has evolved, too, it’s added to itself from other kinds of music.

“Arab music comes from the table, from the lives of families. It is full of poetry,”  he said.  “It is a rich table that’s set with the music.”

In the world, Shaheen is, not so much a rock star, as a figure embodying certain kinds of playing—he plays the Western canon, too, on  the violin—a man who does more than make music—he makes musicians, too.

We talk a little about a great Egyptian singer, Mohamed Abdu Wahad, considered the father of classic Arab music.  Shaheen recorded an instrumental album of his songs.  “The man had many phases in his life,” he said. “Late in his life, he reportedly lost his voice.  But look at the body of work in his life.”

“When you try to understand Arab music, you have to think in terms of rhythms and melodies and how they’re connected,” Shaheen said. “It is deeply lyrical.”

In an online video, taken from his famed album, “Blue Flame,” you can see and hear him playing the ‘oud by himself.  The result, far from strange, is infectious in a serious way.  It is exactly what he says, a rhythmic dance full of melody, hypnotic.

Shaheen, as he did in the aftermath of a snow storm that hit Boston, commutes back and forth from New York, where he lives, to Boston, where he is a professor at the Berklee College of Music.

“I teach violin, cell and mandolin, and hopefully,  we’ll incorporate some Middle Eastern instruments, like the ‘oud, the qanun.”

He incorporates teaching and education elements and workshops in many of his performance, as “a way of spreading the music, giving back.”

What you remember, though, is an idea, that music is transcending, that it can rise above the fray, that it can, simply by being played with passion and exceptionalism, drown out the sounds  that divide the world.

It’s not something he might say—politics is hardly ever tender on the ears.  But music, his own compositions,  the traditional Arab music that he plays, they come from all of our lives, musicians playing their instruments, singing joyful laments, around a tables full of food and drinks.

Georgetowner • February 5, 2015

“Dunsinane,” the National Theater of Scotland’s production of David Greig’s semi-sequel to the Scottish Play, is certainly not “Brigadoon”—and it’s not “Macbeth,” either. Yet, if you take to Greig’s references, it could be Afghanistan.

It is what it is—something of a theatrical marvel in our midst now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall.  It’s actually not like anything at all. It’s original and raw, imaginatively staged, powerfully enacted by an ensemble cast, and, freakishly in some ways, as sharp and horrific as the morning headlines.

Which is utmost strange, since it is set in 11th-century Scotland, a cold place full of bogs, warring clans and danger.    At least that’s what it appears to the grunts of the English army in its red-crossed livery, freezing, dodging arrows and broadswords, battling through the slop and moors.  We are in a story that begins at the end of Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth.”   The soldiers are being yelled at by their officers, as they try to be trees in the forest of Birnam, advancing on the king’s castle Dunsinane.       

There is a battle—which the English win.  Macbeth—laid on and low by MacDuff—is dead.  Lady Macbeth is not.  And it’s a good thing—she apparently did not commit suicide but remained to protect her son, conceived with her first husband, whom Macbeth murdered.The presence of Lady Macbeth, here called Gruach, a  vibrantly witchy, smart and strong woman with blazing red hair and a wicked sense of humor and history, and her son means nothing but trouble for the English commander Siward, a decent, blunt military type, who’s  been sent to install Malcolm as the rightful kind and maintain the peace.

You almost immediately wish Siward a “good luck on that one,” because he’s going to need it.  Not only does he not have a clue about the nuanced way of Scottish negotiation (“seems” is a big word here, as in all is not what it seems to be, not ever) but he’s seduced by the earthy, beautiful Gruach, who does not call herself the Widow Macbeth.  “She’s going to be a problem”, Siward says to Malcolm, a wine-and-women-loving monarch who likes to seem weak, so that he can go on about his treacherous business.  “Not if you kill her, now,” he suggests to Siward.

When Siward, every the practical, sane Englishman, comes up with a plan where nobody has to die—Gruach marries Malcolm, her son becomes the heir—it’s exactly the wrong idea, and results in horrible bloodshed and endless war.   Siward,  a soldier at heart begins to grow weary and heartlessly cruel.  “What did you do with the prisoners,” he’s asked after a raid on a village.  “I burned them,” he says, a response that unsettles not only the characters in the play, but the audience, given news of recent events in the Middle East.

The playwright means for us to think about our times—this is a play about conquest and invasion, strangers in a very strange land, the inability in a hit and run war of atrocities on both sides in which neither side understands the other. The Scots speak an impenetrable brand of Gaelic all their own, with words in which the consonants are at war with the vowels, and their customs and music do not soothe the occupiers.

The production is staged on a staggered-step set which looks primitive, hard on the feet, unforgiving, a giant cross with a circle from pagan days dominating the scenes. The play is not  Shakespeare—it’s closer in tone to something before Shakespeare, sometimes ritualistic and primitive in its language, but it’s also as modern as the sound of chopper blades.

Sioibhan Redmond has played this role a lot on other tours, but she never seems anything less than electric and fresh.  Gruach is a witch of sorts. While she has forceful sex appeal, she also is a purveyor of curses that appeal real in the yelling and saying, especially at plays end.  Against that kind of power,  Darrell D’Silva as Siward is all sharp edges, like a battering ram, his white hair making him at times look like a soldier as prophet. He is a straight-ahead man who gets lost in a thicket of blood.  His soldiers want to go home—some of them brave, some of them not,  some of them masters of the first chance like the wily Egham, a kind of medieval Milo Milenbender, some of them awe-struck like the everyman boy soldier played with wide-eyed wonder by Tom Gill.

Ewan McDonald is sharp and funny as Malcolm, and Helen Darbyshire makes a sad, affecting presence as the hen girl.

Being part of this production even as a spectator makes the events on stage feel strange and foreign. We know the old stories, and we have our new sagas all our own. After a while, everything is a representation of something unsettling, something both foreign and uncomfortably familiar, as it plays itself out on  a stage inundated in snowflakes.

— “Dunsinane” runs at Sidney Harman Hall through Feb. 21.

Gary Tischler •

“Gigi” is back, but then again she’s not.

Whether this new (it has a new book by screenwriter Heidi Thomas) version of an old movie musical which became a Broadway show will become a Broadway hit depends a lot on the kind of audiences it gets, and how those audiences respond.

“Gigi” now in a pre-Broadway tryout run at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through Feb. 12, is markedly different from the movie—a 1958 all-star MGM musical, directed by VIncente Minnelli—or a 1970s staging which did not do all that well.

Few people may remember the stage production—something of a first in its time since it was a Broadway show based on a movie musical, instead of vice versa. But the Lerner & Lowe musical already had its critics—it was considered by some to be “My Fair Lady” light, and indeed, the similarity remains, in the staging and in the music.

“Gigi” is framed in references to other shows—the movie, the play, “My Fair Lady,” even the recent from the ground-up Kennedy Center musical, “Tiny Dancer,” which was also set in Paris during La Belle Epoch at the end of the 19th century.

As it stands, this “Gigi” delivers on the entertainment—the familiar songs are sung with knowing passion, the sets and costumes are outstanding, and Signature Theatre’s artistic director Eric Schaeffer frames this version in a welcome, if not surprising, melodrama.

The producers have cast Vanessa Hudgens—a graduate of Disney Studios “High School Musical”—in the starring role, obviously with an eye to appealing to a younger, contemporary audience. Hudgens—small, dark-haired, nimble, energetic and appealing—handles the role with enthusiasm. She’s that high-strung young adolescent who carries authenticity around as if it were part of her quaint school uniform.

The original film—based on a short novel by the famed French writer Colette—featured a cast of mostly French stars—the luminous Leslie Caron as Gigi, the suave Louis Jordan playing the older debonair swain and the indefatigable Maurice Chevalier as an aging roué.

In this production, Gigi has become a little older—18 —and the object of her affections, Gaston, has become a little younger, so the January-to-December aspects of the original romance become more like an August-October affair.

This—and having Gigi’s aunt and grandmother sing the infamous “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” song—sung by Chevalier with twinkling eyes in the film—provides a more-or-less acceptable gloss on the show’s story, which is about training Gigi to become a mistress to a wealthy, older man. This version—with Hudgens standing up for herself and true love—might go down a lot easier for a modern audience whose members are still looking for love in all the wrong chat rooms.

The show is all about 19th-century Paris—with the new Eiffel Tower, the world’s fair, Maxim’s, men in top hats and women in fantastic gowns, kept girls flashing diamonds—as a kind of theme park of French mores and fashion.

In the film, Minnelli—always a great visual stylist—gave everything a sophisticated sheen, sort of like a big-budget foreign movie and Leslie Caron had the kind of incandescence which is hard to transport to the stage. The sheen remains, but the sophistication is lagging, for which we can actually be grateful.

For this production, Howard McGillin is the roguish roué Honore Lachaille, with the kind of affability that suggests that roués are full of rue. Gigi’s protectors—Mamita, played with strong-voiced warmth by Victoria Clark, and Aunt Alicia, played with alarming and beguiling cynicism by Dee Hoty—command the stage when they’re on, while Corey Cott , strong voiced and handsome, plays what amounts to the perfect boyfriend—Gaston LaChaille, inventor, zillionaire, lover, celebrity, sort of a younger, single George Clooney of the boulevard.

“Gigi” is more than adequately entertaining. It’s like the best sort of ice cream that goes down smoothly. It’s scheduled to open at the Neil Simon Theater in April. Bon chance.

Robert Devaney •

At the George Town Club for a Georgetown Business Association networking reception Jan. 21, new GBA President Charles Camp welcomed guests and got right to the point: the group is here to “help businesses make money.” Another mission for GBA, Camp said, was the fact that “You’ve got to know who your neighbors are.

The new officers greeted members and new members in the Wisconsin Avenue club which has regained its popularity throughout town for meetings, whether business or social.

Camp said he seeks to get GBA more involved with a listserv and a renamed website, such as “GeorgetownBusiness.org.” He also wants the group to work more closely with the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Georgetown Business Improvement District.

“We each have our own niche,” Camp said of the Georgetown groups. “We can work together.”

Gary Tischler •

Just earlier that day, Holocaust survivor Manny Mandel had recited the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer often said by way of mourning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum where candles were lit and music played and dignitaries spoke in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day also happened to be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp where millions of the over six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust died.

And Mandel was there at the Embassy of Hungary that evening to once again recited the Kaddish as part of a special evening at the embassy, which included a deeply diverse, and often emotionally wrenching concert presented by the Embassy Series. The concert featured baritone Jerome Barry (the Embassy Series founder and director), the gifted and young cello player Jacques-Pierre Malan, and pianist George Peachey, who provided a steady and solid underpinning for much of the program.

Mandel and Barry noted that the Kaddish, in this instance, was not about death, but about life and the living, and about the how the incomprehensible number of lives lost were lived.

Auschwitz was the place where approximately half-a-million Hungarian Jews perished in a steady stream of shipments and deportations from Hungary in the Nazis’ last act of horror toward the close of World War II, never stopping in their pursuit of the Final Solution. This occurred in spite of often heroic efforts by many Hungarians to stop, delay or prevent the tragedy.

It was an auspicious evening at the Embassy of Hungary—this was the last official evening for Hungarian ambassador to the United States, His Excellency György Szapáry, who is returning to Hungary on Saturday, Jan. 25.

If the Kaddish is about life, not death, then the concert and its contents—like a mural, a book, a packet of all the lost things the victims carried, including the substance of their lives—became something of a perfect illustration of life, not death.

The concert included musical poems, dances, children’s songs and Hassidic Prayer Chants, three selections from a rabbi’s commentaries on the Talmud, musical memories of childhood, in the manner of E. E. Cummings and the true spirit of young hearts flying, songs from the Holocaust, vivid evocations of life in the ghettos and camps of Poland and Vilna in Lithuania and the so-called Partisanerlid (Partisans’ Song), which members of the resistance sang like a loud but private badge.

Words, in these selections of music, mattered—they conjured weather, nights and days, the ashes in the air, the danger of daily existence, the grind of death and loss, and the spring-insistence on the continuance of life amid the systematic onslaught of destruction.

The concert, or rather the recreation all of the individual lives lost with words and music, was a remarkable achievement of the playing, the singing and the creation of music as a reverent, respectful illustration of content.

Barry, a teacher, singer, cantor, linguist and Vietnam veteran rose to the occasion by treating the material—those songs, those recitations, those poems—with a natural delivery without an inkling of emotive style. The singing was not about calling down the sky or even bearing overbearing witness. It was more an expression of universal kinship. It came from identity, training, experience and empathy that flowed naturally to and from him.

The youthful and gifted cellist Malan brought the strength and depth of the instrument to bear, especially in the playing, with Peachey, of Gabriel Fauré’s “Elegie,” which was described by one writer as the composer’s rare “expression of pathos.”

The concert—dedicated to the victims of terrorism in Paris and the Holocaust—was not an occasion that was principally an opportunity to critique. It seemed to many a kind of work of delicate musical carpentry, built piece by piece from not only the music, and the words, but from the details of lives lived and lost forever. It came from hard nights, pieces of bread rarely received, long journeys to doom, but also still the familial and familiar stuff of daily life, where God is, in spite of all, a strong presence, visible in the invisible, in a pair of shoes, in a stick made to be a toy, in the kind of mark, Pompeii-like, made by the living where they stood, prayed, ate, shivered and comforted each other in community.

Consider the works by Hungarian poet Hannah Szenes, who was killed by the Nazis in 1944: her work “Eli, Eli;” “My God, My God/May these things never end;” “The sand and the sea/The rustle of the water/The lightning in the sky/Man’s prayer.”

The concert veered and trembled through three piano dances, songs from the Holocaust including the familiar Ani ma’amin, believed to have been composed by Reb Azriel David, a Moditzser Hassid when he was in a cattle car on the way to Treblinka. ?

The musical details piled up, like remembrances left at shrine, but living memories, not dead flowers, and the marvel that people in the midst of all this still thought to look up at the sky.

Many of the musical offerings were sung in Yiddish, with an ironic underpinning, in which you notice how familiar it sounds, how close to German en toto, in consonants and vowels they are and you wonder again how we came to this in that time, and how it echoes to this time, a time of technological wonders, and new horrors.
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Gary Tischler •

“The Widow Lincoln,” a world premiere of the new play by Stephen Sill at Ford’s Theater, presents to the audience Mary Todd Lincoln in a lone room, surrounded by giant stacks of baggage and luggage, by ghosts, and memories in the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, time abruptly stopped, the future unknown.

The new play is part of “Ford’s 150: Remembering the Lincoln Assassination,” a series of events marking the 150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865.

“The Widow Lincoln” is a difficult play about a difficult person. The Kentucky-born Mary Todd Lincoln was reviled in the South where she was considered a traitor, not trusted in the North because of her Southern background and criticized in the press and among the city’s social gossips for her spending large sums on outfitting the White House and herself. She was considered an outsider, a Lady Macbeth figure by some. She was, it would appear, ill-prepared for the cloudy role and standing of first lady, but she embraced it dramatically in a way not seen since Dolly Madison. She had few friends, with the exception of the passion of her life, whom she still refers to as Mr. Lincoln or “father.” She was also close to the Elizabeth Kackley, her dressmaker and a former slave.

Mrs. Lincoln was even less prepared for the role of national widow—it was as if a chasm had opened beneath her feet, with the past out of reach, the present tumultuous and the future unknowable.

New York actress Mary Bacon portrays a Mary who is bewildered, keen and heavy with grief, angry, at turns charming and blustering, the White Houses bully. Her grief is enormous, all the more so because it is chaotic and full of a gigantic confusion.

Bacon doesn’t pretty up Mary. She avoids pulling at any sort of strings, heart or otherwise. She doesn’t sentimentalize. Bacon’s widow is a monument to grief’s pain and confusion and its willfullness, too. She speaks to the audience—to us—often, always in the tone of a question, as if we could lead her out of the wilderness.

Mary Todd Lincoln spent 40 days in a locked room in the aftermath of the assassination, attended by Keckley, a servant girl and a guard, who, it turns out, has a secret. She wears black, but does not attend her husband’s funeral—she gets news of the progression of the body and coffin as it travels, mournfully, watched by hundreds of thousands of people in Harrisburg, New York , Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago and Springfield, where Lincoln’s body still rests outside town.

An unseen commentator provides a kind of narrative from newspaper reports—how “negroes were not allowed to attend the proceedings in New York” and how thousands turned out in heavy rains along the way.

Mary is watched over by shadows, ghosts of families who have lost people in the war, ghosts of slaves. Laura Keene, the actress and star of “Our American Cousin” commiserates with Mary and paints a portrait of the hard life of an actress. There is a séance, there is a strange conversation with the guard and there is an appearance by Queen Victoria, who gives Mary advice about grief.

There is, in short, a kind of life on stage, where Mary, all the while sometimes raging against Andrew Johnson, against the Washington tribe which criticized her, avoids leaving the room until she must.

She is, it’s plain to see, avoiding a future as the widow, one that history tells us was painful, difficult, life as a lonely woman often fending off bouts of melancholy and near-madness.

Bacon is the standout here. She is ably abetted by Sarah Marshall as Queen Victoria, Caroline Clay, who gives Keckley a vibrant, down-to-earth energy and Kimberly Schraf as Laura Keene in full theatrical regalia.

This is one of those times in the theater—this theater—where you pay attention to your surroundings. You see audience members at intermission taking selfies, with the empty presidential, flag-draped Lincoln box above the main floor. With this play, the setting becomes poignant, ghostly, and you think at times that you can hearing voices from another time.