“Who we were is who we are.”
The world premiere of Chicago playwright Mike McGeever’s play Lincoln’s Children by Fortune’s Fool Theatre is, among many other things, about gatekeeping - who is allowed to tell what stories and in what way. So, let’s get through the gate I keep when writing reviews of other folks’ theater work right up front and get that out of the way: You should go see Lincoln’s Children (and don’t dawdle, because there’s less than 45 seats in the Crane Theater studio space and they are, quite deservedly, starting to fill up). Lincoln’s Children is a funny, smart and fascinating script which really did (and I guess is still doing) a number on my brain, and it’s delivered by a great cast and production team. When you get a chance to be among the first people to see a really good new play like this, you should jump on it. So if that’s all you really need to know, you can skip the rest of this review where I name names and tussle with the script a bit as I try to articulate just what the heck I think about the thing. Just get your tickets quickly and go see it for yourself (maybe then you can help me solve some of the riddles I’m still trying to unpack).
“I thought you wanted me to argue with you.”
“Yes, but only the things that *I* want to argue about!”
Lincoln’s Children focuses on two writers, one with their career on the way up, and another with a career which may be on the way down. The play begins and ends with Chloe Waters (Kyra Richardson), which is key. Most plays would center the successful white male writer Montgomery Mathers (Jeremy Motz), and most audiences might lean toward following him, and watching the play through his eyes. But that would be a mistake, and it’s a mistake the script toys with in intriguing ways to subvert the viewers' expectations and keep them off balance.
“Sometimes, the way you dress…”
Mathers, a historian and author, hasn’t been able to duplicate the success of his first book about President Abraham Lincoln, with declining interest and declining sales for each new book ever since. Mathers’ agent Irma (Dawn Krosnowski) pushes him while trying to keep him from over-extending himself, personally or financially. Mathers’ more successful mentor Calhoun (Scott Gilbert), a Southerner who is no gentleman but still a very popular author himself, openly mocks Mathers’ flailing current attempt at a new take on Lincoln. Even Ethel (Winifred Froelich), the archivist in charge of the research library who fauns over Mathers whenever he visits, is in many ways just trying to prop up the author’s foundering ego so he doesn’t give up on his work entirely.
“Fine. If forgiveness is that simple, I’m sorry, too.”
Mathers hiring Chloe, a brilliant black graduate student, to be his research assistant takes the play to another level. Because Chloe has a story of her own she wants to tell, and helping Mathers to research his book gives her access and opportunities to further follow her own quest. Chloe’s family tree includes another Chloe, Chloe Jackson (also Kyra Richardson), a slave who for a time was rented out by her Kentucky owner to work as a servant in Illinois for the household of Abraham Lincoln (Nicholas Nelson), then an up-and-coming congressman, and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln (Ariel Pinkerton). The oral history of present day Chloe’s family infers the potentially scandalous suggestion that perhaps Abraham Lincoln was father to one of her ancestors through relations with Chloe Jackson. Mathers tries to keep research for his own book on track, but Chloe’s line of research takes on a life of its own, with Mathers’ publisher expressing more interest in Chloe’s work than his.
“‘Relationships’ do not take that long.”
Director Duck Washington does a stellar job guiding this talented ensemble of actors through a thicket of thorny subject matter, personal interactions, power dynamics and awkward moments that would have the audience laughing one moment and gasping and recoiling the next. The intimate space really does put the audience up in the actors’ business and vice versa. While it’s not audience participation, the comfort of distance and a fourth wall is minimal here, as it should be. The ever-changing evaluation of who’s taking advantage of who (and why) doesn’t end with the reassurance of a final, definitive answer. The audience needs to take that, and many other questions, out the door with them after the play concludes.
“Why should she be nice? I’m not nice.”
The playwright’s note in the program makes it clear that this isn’t a true story. However, the play itself asks us to buy into its reality, which is tricky when you’re dealing with characters who say they care about truth and history and facts - in something that is a piece of fiction. What are the scenes in the past, really? Where is this alternate timeline for Abraham Lincoln and Mary and Chloe stemming from? How seriously are we supposed to take these scenes and what happens in them? How much should we be investing in them? Are all of these questions that the play and production refuse to answer part of a deliberate strategy to knock the audience off balance and keep them there? I honestly couldn’t tell you. But it’s not a theatrical experience that most plays and productions put me in, so it was compelling to sit in all that for a couple of hours, stew in my feelings and realize I wasn’t going to get any assistance, I was just going to have figure out how I felt about it all on my own. And I’m going to need more than 12 or 24 hours to find a way to articulate that, so here we are.
“That’s why I like history. It never changes.”
And while I enjoyed all the characters and the inter-relationships past and present, Richardson and Motz are so good as Chloe and Mathers, and their characters are so rich and full of potential, I did find myself wondering a lot of the time, why isn’t it just these two people and no one else? Do we really need the other modern day characters, who, fun as they are, spend a lot of their time giving or setting up exposition we might just as easily get in other ways through the two primary characters and their interaction? Also, in addition to Mathers’ faltering career, we learn that he is also supposedly grieving the death of his wife of many years, but that seismic shift in his personal life and support system is left almost completely unexplored, to the point where it might as well never have been mentioned. And Chloe’s life outside of her research and literary quest is also a blank. I found myself wanting more depth in these characters, and more opportunity for these actors, than the play was willing to provide me as an audience member.
“My ex-husband - he washed the dishes, once, and you’d think he freed the slaves.”
Some design/production choices also left me scratching my head. This isn’t a reflection on the work of Christopher Goddard, the stage manager - they keep everything moving smoothly along throughout the night. Keven Lock’s set and Terri Ristow’s properties work do a great job of doing double duty for both the present and the past, and look great as well. But did so much time between scenes really need to be spent rotating the table a few inches to a foot in one direction or the other? In one sense, I do understand that, with the audience on three sides in the studio space, if things don’t shift somehow, some folks are only ever going to get to see the back of someone’s head. But director Washington and the actors were skillful at never staying still for too long in any one configuration, always keeping things moving. So I question the need for table shifting, when actors or chairs could be shifting instead.
“Neither of us can show how clever we are.”
The costumes designed by CJ Mantel also look wonderful, especially the period looks for some characters. But given the dual nature of the Chloe role, was it necessary to make 21st century Chloe’s look so completely and fully transform to 19th century Chloe that it required extensive costume changes which slowed the flow of the play? Could a partial change for the Chloe of the past, never entirely obscuring modern day Chloe from our view, have sped things along and not impaired the point of the play? The audience knows it’s the same actor, and this is theater, suspension of disbelief and all, motion picture verisimilitude isn’t entirely necessary. Also, the play is clearly drawing parallels between Chloe's service to the Lincolns and Chloe's work in service of Mathers, and the fact that in both situations, the men push the boundaries of what would be considered appropriate behavior. It's part of the reason the play has the same actress in both roles. Some visual blending of the two women could still be in keeping with the themes and purpose of the play and this doubling choice by the playwright.
“[This wine] is just fine enough. If it were any better, the master wouldn’t have given it to me. If it were any worse, I wouldn’t have drunk it.”
Ariel Pinkerton’s lighting design makes the most of creating different worlds in the small stage area the production has to work with, and the light between scenes offers glimpses of characters crossing paths in changing the location that we might otherwise not be graced with, so that’s fun as well. Christy Johnson’s sound design has a pre-show/intermission/post-show set list I very much want to recreate and listen to again, and the sound cues creating the world of our two authors doing remote interviews for television are a nice touch. I’m not sure why the script asks for Mathers to be revisited with dialogue in voiceover from recent conversations. Motz is a good actor - we realize he’s still carrying around the words of other characters in his head and that they might be influencing his actions going forward. (In fact, the words were all still ringing in my ears as well because those other scenes happened at most 15 minutes ago. I’m not sure why we need flashbacks in the text to things that happened in the same act.)
“It’s not stealing, it’s liberating.”
[Hey, why so picky, Everett? I thought you said this was a really good production of a really good new play.] It is, it is. Nothing I just typed above undoes that. The fact is, Fortune’s Fool Theatre’s production of Lincoln’s Children is operating at such a high level, it makes the little things pop out a bit more. There is so much material I am not delving into or spoiling here. I really just want as many people as possible to go see this new play and come up with their own answers - or have their own unanswered questions - about it. This production is tackling race, gender, and American history, just for starters, all of which can be (and here, are) quite fraught. And yet it’s still engaging the audience in ways that allow them to laugh, or cause them to hold their breath in anticipation of that thing that may (or may not) happen, waiting to hear and see how a character onstage is going to react. Lincoln’s Children is the kind of thing live theater was invented to do. So buy a ticket and go be in the same room with all these talented artists while they do their thing, and do it so well.
“I think they said my last book was the worst thing to happen to Lincoln since the assassination.”
Fortune’s Fool Theatre’s world premiere production of Lincoln’s Children runs now through September 22, 2024 in the studio space of Crane Theater (2303 Kennedy St. NE, Minneapolis 55413). Friday, Saturday and Monday performances are at 7:30pm, Sunday performances are at 2pm.
4.5 Stars - Very Highly Recommended
(photos by Scott Pakudaitis; top: Kyra Richardson as Chloe Jackson/Chloe Walters; middle, l-r, Jeremy Motz as Montgomery Mathers, Kyra Richardson as Chloe Jackson)
While I have your attention, please VOTE :)
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As a queer playwright and theater maker, I want a government that's compassionate and competent enough to keep us all safe and healthy, keep theaters open and running, and personally, I'd just like to be legal myself and keep the weirdos out of government and out of my personal business (and the things I post on this blog, for instance). We all have our reasons, so let's make sure we get the leaders we need and deserve, and get our friends, family and co-workers to raise their voices, too.
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