The many faces of Lincoln in the arts

"Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."

— Abraham Lincoln

He is a national icon immortalized as "Honest Abe" and "The Great Emancipator." His craggy, earnest visage — youthful and clean-shaven, later careworn and bearded — was the first U.S. president's face to be frequently photographed. His life story — poverty, to power, to martyrdom — has been burnished in countless biographies, plays and films.

This is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's 1809 birth. Biographers, museums, theaters and filmmakers are seizing the chance to measure the legacy of our 16th president. And to explore the mythologizing of him, and how the myth befits the man.

In the works: Steven Spielberg is still planning a movie about Lincoln's presidency, written by Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and adapted from the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

(Another planned Lincoln-related film, "The Conspirator," under Robert Redford's direction, is about the arrest and trial of Mary Surratt, the first woman to be executed by the U.S., after she was found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln.)

And opening at Seattle's Intiman Theatre this week: Robert E. Sherwood's "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," a rarely performed, Pulitzer Prize-honored Broadway bio-play.

Scholar Ronald C. White, author of "A. Lincoln: A Biography," and "Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural," welcomes such dramatizations. He hopes they help illuminate the achievements and challenges of the man often ranked as our greatest president.

White is dismayed by how little Lincoln is studied today in U.S. schools.

"Every generation has its own questions, brings its own point of view to the study of Lincoln," he observes, "just as every generation has to look beyond the dogmas of the past, to redefine the meaning of what America is."

The director of "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," Intiman's Sheila Daniels, finds Lincoln's saga very in tune with our time. "It's a great time to do this play," she says. "There are many similarities between the Great Depression era, when Sherwood wrote it, and the social upheaval and economic troubles of today."

Daniels also notes that "this play really humanizes Lincoln. You learn he was a very flawed person who pushed beyond that — which makes him even more of a hero to me."

Sherwood's three-act, 12-scene drama begins in the 1830s as the young, Kentucky-born Lincoln, bred in rural poverty in Indiana, strives to become a lawyer and a politician in Illinois. The play chronicles his close friendships with men and courtships of women, and ends with his 1860 election as leader of a nation that would soon crack in two in a wrenching Civil War.

"Abe Lincoln in Illinois" debuted on Broadway in 1938, starring Raymond Massey, who resembled the tall, gangly, rawboned Abe. It garnered paeans from such influential critics as Richard Watts Jr. ("one of the great achievements of the American theatre and the American spirit"), and was a box-office hit. A popular movie version followed, and later two TV versions, and a Tony Award-nominated Broadway revival in 1993 starring Sam Waterston.

The play, according to Daniels, reveals "many sides of Lincoln — the lover, the lawyer, the scholar, the student, the hick, the budding statesman. Sherwood doesn't paint him as someone who starts out as a hero. It's the journey of his growth as a man."

The script calls for 30-plus actors (Intiman's version has 19 actors, some playing multiple roles). That's the main reason it isn't often staged, but another is some passages now seem overly reverential and too pageant-like.

But Daniels asserts it is far less so than the classic 1940 movie "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," also with Massey. "There are a few sentimental moments in the play, but the movie is sticky with them."

Daniels was determined not to mount it as a well-furnished "museum piece," but with a simplicity more reflective of modern epic theater, bolstered by folksy acoustic music led by John Ackermann, of the band Awesome.

In her research, she discovered what White (a fellow of the Huntington Library, in Los Angeles) emphasizes: We're still learning about the Lincoln behind the official portraits and statuary, via new research on his law practice, his relationships and his spells of depression.

Lincoln's funks can be partly attributed to the early deaths of his mother and other loved ones. His mental state is elucidated in the recent book, "Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness," by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

White also probed the subject in his new Lincoln biography. "I talked with a psychiatrist who said one reason some people get depressed is that they see reality more clearly than most of us do. They see the pain of others, and feel it more keenly."

As compassionate as he became, the young, ambitious Lincoln could engage in ripping sarcasm. "His satire could sting and his humor could hurt," agrees White, noting that political discourse at the time could get even more savage than it is today. (Some Lincoln opponents caricatured him as a baboon and a black man in cartoons and illustrations, due to his opposition to slavery.)

But White also stresses, "Lincoln grew into a person of great gentleness and kindness, who could say 'with malice toward none, with charity for all' in his second inaugural address, and mean it."

Another finding: Lincoln was a brilliant orator, but his voice was not deep and mellifluous (like Massey's). It was high-pitched, rising to a falsetto if he got very nervous.

More tellingly, Lincoln was comfortable with ambiguity and complexity in ways that might brand him a "flip-flopper" today.

According to Kearns, White and other historians, he felt free to change position on issues as he deliberated, sought advice and as circumstances changed. That included his position on slavery, which he morally abhorred but didn't believe he had the power to end — yet ultimately did, with the Emancipation Proclamation.

"I think President Barack Obama, who has spoken and written often of Lincoln, wants to be a deliberative president also," White says. "I wonder if we'll let him."

Given Lincoln's totemic place in history, and personal complexity, an actor playing him has a tall assignment.

Liam Neeson was originally set to star in the Spielberg film (for which no shooting or release date has been set). And after hearing Neeson read from the movie script, at a Library of Congress event, White approves of the choice.

"You have to make Lincoln a very complicated person, not simply Old Abe of Illinois, but a man wrestling with a lot of deep concerns. That's difficult to communicate, but I think Neeson can do it."

Daniels cast her net far and wide to find the lead for the Intiman show, and settled on tall, lean TV and stage actor Erik Lochtefeld.

"A lot of guys I auditioned looked even more like Lincoln," Daniels recalls. "But Erik can be unassuming one moment, and thrillingly charismatic the next. He has the soul for the part."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com