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| Melissa Gilbert and Mark Kenneth Smaltz. Photo: Carol Rosegg |
If Only
By Thomas Klingenstein
Directed by Christopher
McElroen
Cherry Lane Theatre
Through Sept. 17
By Lauren Yarger
If only all plays could be so lyrical, eloquent and timely. .
.
Thomas Klingenstein's poignant new play If Only,
getting a limited Off-Broadway run at the Cherry Lane Theatre through Sept. 17,
imagines what race relations in our country might be like had President Abraham
Lincoln not been assassinated.
Set 36 years after John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot at
Ford's Theater, the play follows the reunion of two people who called President
Abraham Lincoln “friend.” Ann Astorcott ("Little House on the
Prairie"'s Melissa Gilbert), is a stifled New York society housewife who recently
took in a mute orphan named Sophie (Korinne Tetlow) to do something useful with
her life. Being a housewife is rather unfulfilling for the woman who met Lincoln
and served at a hospital during the war. That is where she met Samuel Johnson
(Mark Kenneth Smaltz), a runaway slave who went on to serve as Lincoln's valet.
All these years later, Samuel has been in contact and is coming for a visit.
Inattentive husband, Henry (Richmond Hoxie), agrees to allow Ann
to have a visitor -- just another whim he gives in to as proof of his love for
the wife he doesn't quite understand. He doesn't get her obsession with
Lincoln, whom he accuses her of giving deity status thanks to a bust she keeps
on her desk.
"Not a god," she replies, "But as perfect as God
made a man."
He shrugs off the visit as unimportant and leaves to attend a
meeting. What he doesn't realize is that Lincoln represented a hope of how
things might have been not only for racial relations in America, but for
possibilities of marriage between blacks and whites -- that is to say, between
Samuel and Ann.
During their visit, it becomes clear that this couple shared a great
love and that both still care deeply, though Ann is in denial and pretends not
to remember some of their cherished moments together. Their conversation is
engaging, intellectual and stimulating about everything from how to re-arrange
the apartment (beautifully appointed in Victorian style by Scenic Designer
William Boles) to the complexities of Lincoln's plan to make -- or not make, as
the debate ensues -- blacks and whites equal.
Their discourse is a sharp contrast to the conversation between
Ann and Henry, where the couple talks in distracted fashion without ever
communicating. Ann's primary means of expression are a story-journal she keeps
(which alludes to her experiences with Lincoln and Samuel) and which she reads
aloud to Sophie. In subtle direction, we see that Samuel, in offering a pillow
to Ann, is much more attentive to her real needs than her husband, who is more
obsessed with the inanimate portrait of his perfect image of his wife that
hangs in the parlor.
Klingenstein's dialogue is eloquent and lyrical. Combined with
subtle lighting (Design by Becca Jeffords) and muted colors and tones in the
set and costumes (Design by Kimberly Manning), Director Christopher McElroen
transports us back in time while spotlighting issues about race that, in many
ways, don't seem all that different in 2017. It's a skillful journey.
Klingenstein, a New York-based playwright whose work has been presented at The
Lark where If Only was developed, has
another play from the era, Douglass, which premiered last year in
Chicago.
Gilbert delivers layers for Ann, taking her from the wife who
doesn't want to upset Henry in the slightest to the intelligent woman hiding
underneath the norm demanded by society. This woman isn't afraid to speak her
mind and expound ideas that would upset a great many in the country. Smaltz
portrays Samuel as elegant, caring, patient and tolerant, as he understands
that change can't come all at once.
"Memory cannot reshape the soul," and "anger has no
logic all its own," he observes in some of the thought-provoking
statements that pepper the conversation. Samuel has a way of retelling history
(he's a teacher of it) that makes it real -- much like the gift of this
playwright has in bringing the past to the present in just 85 minutes without
intermission..
If Only runs
only through Sept. 17 at the Cherry Lane Theater, 38 Commerce St.
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