Program Notes: Our American Cousin
By Klára Móricz
On Palm Sunday April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate Army
surrendered
to General Ulysses S. Grant's Union troops. The American Civil War, which
had raged
for four years and cost 700,000 lives, ended with Union victory. On April
11, President
Lincoln gave an impromptu speech from a window in the White House in which
he stated
that he intended to grant suffrage to former slaves. Lincoln's promise infuriated
actor
John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), who was in the crowd in front of the White
House.
According to his former friend Louis Weichmann, Booth turned to him and said:
"Now by
God, I'll put him through." Booth was born in Maryland to a family of
actors who shaped
Shakespearean acting in nineteenth-century America. Although reasonably successful
on the stage, Booth aspired higher. As the Civil War progressed, he gradually
gave up
acting and became a Confederate secret agent. After Lincoln's reelection in
November
1864, Booth devoted his energies to a plot of kidnapping the President. As
this plan failed,
Booth became desperate. "For six months we had worked to capture,"
he wrote in his
diary, "but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great
must be done." To
his friends he announced that he was done with the stage. For his last performance,
he
said, he planned to play in Venice Preserv'd, an English Restoration play
by Thomas Otway
about a conspiracy against the senate in Venice. Only those who knew the play's
plot
understood that Booth aspired to the role of assassin.
In fact, Booth remained an actor until the
very end. He scripted his plot for the assassination
of President Lincoln to the last line, casting himself in the main role. This
final role, he
knew, would make him more famous than his father or brothers. "Do you
plan on seeing
the show tonight?" he asked the owner of Star Saloon, whisky in hand,
as he waited
for the curtain to rise on the performance of Our American Cousin in Ford's
Theater, in
Washington, DC. "You ought to. You'll see some damn fine acting!"
Since Booth's family was friends with John
T. Ford, the theater's owner, Booth had free
access to all parts of the theater; he himself had played there on several
occasions, once
even before President Lincoln. On Good Friday, April 14, Laura Keene's traveling
company
was performing in the theater. Keene had been forced to give up her own theater
on
Broadway due to the war. She toured with her company to maintain her income,
and,
before arriving in Washington, DC, she invited President Lincoln to see Our
American
Cousin, a farcical comedy by Tom Taylor about the meeting of an awkward, rough-hewn
American with his aristocratic English relatives. Keene knew Lincoln personally
and was
sure that the President, who loved low comedy as much as he loved Shakespeare's
tragedies,
would accept her invitation.
Booth was familiar with the play and could
recognize the lines while waiting outside the
presidential box. He knew that in Act II, scene 2 only one actor, Harry Hawk,
would be
onstage. He chose that moment to enter the box and fire a leaden ball into
Lincoln's skull.
He then planned to use his acrobatic skills to jump fifteen feet on the stage
and deliver his
line, "Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Always to tyrants!"), the
motto of the State of Virginia.
Lincoln's assassination is one of the best-documented
events in American history. Booth,
fatally shot in Bowling Green, Virginia, by Union soldiers twelve days after
his escape
from Ford's Theater, became the protagonist of historical studies (i.e. James
Swanson's
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, 2007; Alan Axelrod's Lincoln's
Last
Night: Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and the Last Thirty-Six Hours Before
the
Assassination, 2005; and Thomas Goodrich's The Darkest Dawn: Lincoln, Booth,
and the
Great American Tragedy, 2006, to name only the most recent), of popular theater
(i.e. the
musical Assassins by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman), and television movies
(i.e.
The Day Lincoln Was Shot).
Eric Sawyer and John Shoptaw's opera, Our
American Cousin (2007) is the first operatic
treatment of the subject. Because of the inherent complexity of the genre,
history and
fiction, action and reflection are subtly layered to create a deeply felt
musical and poetic
commentary on one of the greatest traumas of American history. The music itself
has
poetic power, exemplified by Sawyer's decision to start the opera with a chord
progression
that outlines both the beginning of the tune "Hail to the Chief,"
the official anthem
of the President of the Unites States, and the first melodic phrase of the
"Dona nobis
pacem" ("Grant us peace") movement of J. S. Bach's B Minor
Mass [Disc 1 | Track 1].
Already this initial gesture signifies the composer and librettist's intention
to downplay
Booth's role in the national tragedy. Violent, obsessive, over-ambitious,
and, most crucially,
unreflective, Booth remains a two-dimensional character in the opera, fixated
on
his intended "glorious act." By turning the stage into reality and
the play into history, he
aimed to become, as he says in the opera, "the last Shakespearian."
But can one enter
history by playing in real life the roles that Shakespeare created for the
stage? Over-acted
and badly executed, Booth's final act is consciously de-centered in Our American
Cousin.
His heroic jump is turned into a miserable leap because his leg is caught
in the Union flag,
his intended, pretentious line becomes a curse ("Damned flag spoiled
my leap!"), and his10 11
central act is interpreted by the audience as a "gag," unexpected,
yet still seen as part of
the comedy [2 | 8].
Comedy and tragedy, art and reality, action
and reflection thus mix almost seamlessly in
the opera. The comedy played on stage spoils Booth's intended heroic performance,
just
as the brutal interruption of the comic play violates the sanctuary Laura
Keene offered to
the audience as protection from the wounds of war. The highpoint of fun, the
audience's
long-time favorite, would have been Lord Dundreary's sneeze, an extravagant
mannerism
originally introduced into Our American Cousin by English actor E. A. Sothern.
In the opera,
this is precisely the moment when a woman's voice from the President's box
announces
that Lincoln has been shot [2 | 8]. Bewildered, Ned Emerson, the actor who
plays Lord
Dundreary, stops mid-sneeze and leaves the stage, while his interrupted sneeze
reverberates
in the audience's outcries "shot," "ahhh, shoot."
A different transition between comic stage
action and serious off-stage reflection marks
Lincoln's earlier aria, the high point of the second act [1 | 22]. After Asa,
the American
cousin, finishes his tall tale about "possum herding," Lincoln joins
in the audience's laughter,
praising Harry Hawk, who played Asa for his "common" look. Accused
by his enemies
of being common, vulgar, and boorish himself, Lincoln could have easily identified
with
"the backwoods bumpkin, honest Asa," who, as Laura Keene describes
him in her introduction
to the play, "travels east to reunite two severed branches of a family."
To make the
similarity between Asa and Lincoln stronger, Asa's birthplace is changed in
the opera from
Vermont to Illinois. But the relief provided by Asa's antics ("Don't
know when I laughed
so hard," Lincoln says) is short lived. The word "constitution"
serves as a pivot to switch
Lincoln's attention from his "hard-to-look-at" physical appearance
to the shame of the
United States, the institution of slavery, which is so "hard to look
at, difficult to see." If
you don't face it, if you don't destroy it, Lincoln reflects, it spreads and,
like an overgrown
vine, "cracks your house in two."
The images of the house cracked in two (a
reference to Lincoln's speech at the Republican
Convention on June 16, 1858: "A house divided against itself cannot stand"),
of the
removed vine (in Lincoln's aria), of the moon cut into two, of the missing
limbs (in Hawk's
aria), Emerson's cane broken by Booth in the opera's first scene, the death
of Hawk's
substitute in the war that irreversibly severs him from his shadowy double,
the presence
of the amputee war veterans and widows in the audience, the interrupted sneeze
and
the violently truncated comedy, are all related to the central topic of the
opera: the sense
of truncation and division that permeates the painful reality of the United
States at the
time of the Civil War. Even the partitioned space in which the actors move-onstage
and
offstage, fantasy and reality, comedy and tragedy-reflects this theme.
At climactic moments these divided worlds
collide. In scene 5 of Act I, the backstage
rehearsal culminates in Hawk's, Emerson's, and Mathews's rough drinking song
(a scene
we never see in the play itself, since it comes after the assassination) [1
| 13]. As the
rehearsal develops into a scuffle, Booth, always eager to incite violence,
joins in from a
distance, singing the refrain of Dan Emmett's minstrel tune "Dixie,"
which became the
unofficial anthem of the Confederate States during the Civil War. In the opera
the end
of the line, "look away, Dixie Land" is changed to "look away,
if you can," signaling the
contrast between Lincoln's painful and difficult looking at the shame of slavery
and the
South's deliberate "looking away" from the cruelty of America's
"peculiar institutions."
Booth's line serves as a connecting link between the stage fight and the reality
of war
represented by the audience whose lines, heard earlier in the opera, seep
in the ensemble,
giving voice to widows mourning their loved ones, to businessmen cheering
over their war
profit, to nurses who tended the wounded, to amputee veterans who lost their
limbs, and
to freedmen who fought in the war.
Booth's dark shadow is cast over the play
on stage in another scene, too. As Lincoln
has his comic double in the generous, boorish Asa of the play, so does Booth
in the evil
solicitor Coyle. Coyle's lines about the document that assures his future
ownership of the
Dundrearys' property is echoed offstage by Booth's threatening reference to
his letter to
the editor of The National Intelligencer, which he had written to assure his
future historical
significance [2 | 2].
In contrast to Booth's two-dimensional figure,
the other actors are represented in the
opera as complex human beings haunted by guilt. Harry Hawk, who receives a
letter in the
first act about his substitute's death in the war, tells his surrealistic
dream of finding the
corpse on a moon-lit blue field [1 | 5]. The images of the aria again recall
a truncated reality
of missing limbs and missing lives. Hawk's final aria registers his second
missed chance
of taking real action by stopping the escaping Booth [2 | 10]. "Now I
am condemned to
play myself," the guilt-ridden Hawk sings. A similar guilt assails Jack
Mathews (who plays
Coyle) to whom Booth entrusted the letter intended to appear in The National
Intelligencer
after the assassination. He realizes too late that his irresponsible act of
pocketing the
letter without checking it cost the President's life. Although he despises
Booth for pretending
to be "a man of consequence," he also knows that he, Booth's "breathless
messenger,"
will take his shared responsibility for the crime to his grave [2 | 11]. United
by their
inability to take real action, Mathews and Hawk burn the letter, escaping
from the police
as well as from their own guilt into their transient actor personalities:
"we're guilty-we
know it-of something, of everything we did not do."
By burning the letter, Hawk and Mathews attempt
to erase private and public memory. The
scene is marked in the music by the last, grotesquely distorted appearance
of a motive,
one that appears during moments of forgetting and remembering. This falling
chromatic
figure first occurs in the orchestral prelude; it returns during Hawk's aria
when Hawk, after
receiving the letter about the death of his substitute in the war, tries to
block out reality
with alcohol; it reappears when Asa chooses to forget his ownership of Dundreary
Manor;
and it surfaces, most crucially, when Laura Keene, manager of evocation and
forgetting,
invites the audience "to forget awhile." Although she shares this
motive of forgetting and
remembering with others, she seems to be the only one who has the power to
consciously
thicken or dissipate the fog of oblivion. The distortion of the motive in
the last act suggests
that Hawk and Mathew's retreat from reality into the theater, "where
everything,
where nothing ever happens," is futile, a grotesque distortion of Laura
Keene's attempt to
maintain the theater as a temporary refuge from reality.
Laura Keene's refuge, however, cannot transform
reality. The contrast between the world
of theater and the world of reality creates guilt-a guilt that, like division,
permeates the
opera. It is only Booth, simplistic poseur that he is, who is untouched by
guilt. Lincoln's
melancholy figure is constantly shadowed by a sense of guilt-guilt for the
shameful condition
of slavery, for the truncated country, for the bloodshed caused by the "pestilent
war." Although guilt frequently colors the lines of the actors, the character
who takes
on most of the guilt in the opera is Laura Keene. She is the one who invited
Lincoln to
watch the play, who encouraged her audience to "leave the world behind"
and set sorrows
free, who promised "the North and South will pass away, forgiven and
forgotten" [1 | 15].
But her guilt is more global than that. Accused after the assassination by
Mary Lincoln
of having the immoral profession of acting, she poses questions about the
role of art in
general, about artists' right to practice their art during war, and about
their self-deceptive
belief that "art brings peace." At the end she is forced to acknowledge
art's powerlessness:
"I couldn't keep the bloodshed out; I couldn't keep the war from breaking
in."
In contrast to Booth who remains trapped in
his actor's pose, Laura Keene manages to
assume roles that carry significance beyond the events surrounding Lincoln's
death. After
the assassination her guilt transforms her momentarily into Lady Macbeth,
who, turned
insane after her participation in regicide, tries to wash the blood off her
clothes. "I'll never
get it out of my sight," Keene sings frantically. But she is not only
the theater manager, the
famous actor, the fictitious Mary Dundreary in the play, and Lady Macbeth
in her imagination,
she is also Mary Magdalene, who, in this Passion scene of Good Friday, holds
and
washes the head of the sacrificial victim. Her words, "Jesus, pour down
your pity," uttered
while she is cradling Lincoln's head in her lap, plea for mercy for all [2
| 9]. And mercy
of a sort is granted, because Keene, like Mary Magdalene in the garden of
Gethsemane,
gains access to a transfigured reality. In a scene recalling that in which
the resurrected
Christ addresses Mary Magdalene in the garden, Lincoln's spirit briefly reappears,
though
without divine understanding.
During the light and almost comical last words
of Lincoln's spirit ("I can't carry a tune two
feet before I spill it.") the orchestra is reduced first to a few rattling,
broken chords on a
banjo, then falls totally silent during Lincoln's quotation from his favorite
play, Macbeth
("Duncan is in his grave. After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.")
[2 | 13]. The silencing of
the orchestra at this moment is significant. Besides underlining Lincoln's
unmusical personality,
it also negates the long-lived illusion that art (especially music) has redeeming
power. Music can provide local color (as by quoting "Dixie," "Hail
to the Chief," and
the Civil War song "When This Cruel War is Over" or by faintly echoing
Negro spirituals,
patriotic marches, seafaring songs or operetta); it can express feelings,
differentiate characters
and scenes, enhance the drama, relieve and refresh memory, but its redemptive,
healing power is limited. The musical silence that surrounds Lincoln in this
last moment
in the opera signals the assassinated President's release from memory and
guilt, and
grants him a fleeting rebirth as an imperfect, but guilt-free human being,
disrobed of the
heavy presidential garb of responsibility. Obviously, this liberated Lincoln
has no answer
to Keene's last question: "Oh Mister President, don't you really know
what happened?" It
is not Lincoln who must make sense of the events, but the survivors.
Paradoxically, Sawyer's gesture of deflating
art by silencing it during Lincoln's last words
enhances the redeeming potential of the last scene. In the final chorus the
audience of
Ford's Theater is heard, chanting the long list of names of places where battles
were
fought, bodies were mangled, and the country was dismembered [2 | 14]. This
final
incantation sounds like a desperate effort to make sense of events, to re-member
what
was dismembered,to heal what cannot be healed, and to complete the truncated
line ("pluribus,
pluribus, pluribus"-from many parts) of the motto of the united country
("E pluribus unum"-from many, one). The repetition of the word pluribus
also echoes
the French pleurs (tears), giving this final chorus the mourning solemnity
of Bach's
Passions.
Ultimately, the opera is not so much about
the violent act of Lincoln's assassination by
John Wilkes Booth as it is about the condition of truncation, division and
dismembering,
and the possibility of healing, which, as the characters reflect, can come
only through the
purgatory of memory and the acceptance of guilt. "Funny, how hard it
is to remember,
to piece it all together, to pick up the threads and thrums of what happened,"
the audience
sings in the final chorus. What glimmers through the mist of history, the
mist of
forgetting, mis- and re-membering in this opera is something we are still
trying to piece
together.
© 2007 Klára Móricz
Photo Credits:
Clive Grainger
