The Story

hen Harry Hawk unwittingly delivers his fateful line in Our American Cousin in Act III (“You sockdologizing old man-trap!”), John Wilkes Booth will enter Abraham Lincoln's box and put a bullet in his brain. Booth, an actor himself, knows the play well and has it planned carefully--the big laugh will cover the sound of the gunshot, and Hawks will be onstage alone as Booth runs past him towards the exit.

Christopher Fabbro as Booth

We meet Booth waiting outside Lincoln’s theater box on the fateful evening which will change his life and the course of history. Intensely vain, awkward and self-doubting, he is an unlikely murderer: more Hamlet than the Brutus he wishes to be, and more Lear’s Fool than either. We follow him through the next hour as he struggles to write a farewell letter to his mother and even remember his “lines,” as episodic flashbacks of his family and love life intervene and threaten to deter him from his appointed task. From these flashbacks, we learn of Booth’s jealous love and bitter hatred for his actor father, Junius Brutus, who died when he was young; his envious alienation from his brother, Edwin; his inherently deceptive relationship with his beloved, Lucy Hale; and his growing anti-Union sentiment, which has already led to a botched attempt to kidnap Lincoln. In the final moments of the play Booth is faced with a crisis of conscience in which he must choose whether to take the life of a man who has become the scapegoat for all of his past disappointments, or risk losing his own soul...

John Wilkes Booth

Although this play uses history as a background, it is not so much a historical play (with a capital “H”) as it is a play (capital “P”). Using history as a backdrop for the plot, it blends fact and fiction and attempts to “fill in the blanks,” in the same vein as Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus or William Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.

Unlike previous dramatizations of Lincoln's assassination, it portrays Booth not as a moustache twirling madman but as a sensitive, neurotic, and strangely likeable if tragically flawed man. In another departure from conventional biographical treatments about Booth and Lincoln, this story almost entirely ignores Lincoln (as his story is well known), and tells the story entirely from Booth's perpective, with all its flaws and biases. Above all, it recreates a highly dramatic Booth--an actor to the end--who not only chooses a theater in which to commit his act, but who understands Lincoln’s murder and all that led up to it as a kind of grand theatrical performance.