Abe's in Arms: The Heavens Are Hung in Black @ Ford's Theatre

Lincoln is now often found to be the most beloved of all presidents, but history's favor has been a long time coming. As recently as 100 years ago, when the long-defunct proposal to build a memorial in Lincoln's honor was being revived, you had to hold him up as the Preserver of the Union - not the Great Emancipator - to get anything like universal signoff on his worthiness.

It’s that divided Lincoln that Still, Selby, and director Stephen Rayne animate here - the man who in his heart wants slavery to end, but hasn’t yet found the heart to end it. Like all the best dramatized biographies, Heavens confines its reconstructions to a specific, defining period: The roughly five months in 1862 between the death of Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie and his drafting of the first document ending slavery in the Confederate States. This material is the stuff of dreams for any halfway capable dramatist. Lincoln and his seance-practicing wife, mourning their own child even as Lincoln is ordering a nation of mothers and fathers to sacrifice theirs.

Still's handling of all this is the stuff of dreams, too. Literally: Drawing from modern histories that argue Lincoln was a depressive insomniac, Still illuminates the workings of his restless mind by peopling his dreams with a conspicuous dramatis personae. There's Walt Whitman, his most eloquent supporter; John Brown, the abolitionist hung in 1859 for leading the slave revolt at Harper’s Ferry; Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy; Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's one-time romantic rival, who beat him for a Senate seat but lost the White House to him; and Dred Scott, the escaped slave who in 1857 sued for his freedom and lost. Hearing Lincoln converse with these men in dreams might seem like an overly didactic device, but Selby and his castmates -- Edward James Hyland's Davis and Hugh Nees's Douglas, especially -- pull it off. Nees is equally good in his scenes in Lincoln's waking life as War Secretary Edwin Stanton.

Not all of the show's multi-part casting is so adroit: David Emerson Toney is terrific as Scott, but having him also play a White House butler, Old Black Soldier, er, Uncle Tom, and worst of all, Completely Extraneous and Anonymous Black Guy in a Suit, in the final moment of the show -- every single role for a black actor here -- eventually starts to feel mighty uncomfortable, especially given all of Lincoln's oft-discussed consternation over "what to do with the free negro." Yes, it's an artistically valid look into the mind of a man who would have thought of black people mainly in the abstract. And yes, they're individually small parts in terms of stage-time, so having a single actor play them all no doubt made good fiscal sense, too. Still, you cringe a little.

Happily, the stuff that works really works. If a late-in-the-show visit to the Old Soldiers' Home goes on a bit too long, well, it’s a small price to pay for the sight of Michael Goodwin's grandfatherly Whitman waxing poetic on the sight of a “Washington City” full of homeless, wounded veterans. And because Still has already solved the problem of how to illuminate a man’s internal deliberations, we can enjoy without narrative obligation his cleverest trick: Having Lincoln interrupt a rehearsal of Henry V starring the most famous actor named Booth of his time - Edwin Booth, elder brother of the future assassin John Wilkes.

The famously Shakespeare-loving president surprises Booth (an appropriately regal James Denvil, understudying on this night a role usually played by Michael Kramer) and company by quoting from memory a lowly soldier's observation that "the king hath a heavy reckoning to make / If his cause be not good." (Hey, James Still: Why not have Lincoln interrupt Hamlet instead? It's the role Booth was most famous for, and anyway, isn't this a play about a guy who knows what he must do but needs to navel-gaze his way into doing it?)

No wonder this president is so adored by theater-types and writers, especially. “I have great respect for the semicolon,” declares the great scribe of a Commander-in-Chief in one of the show’s priceless little tributes to his eccentricity. “It’s a mighty handy little fella.”

Hear, hear, Mr. President.

The Heavens Are Hung in Black is at Ford's Theatre through March 8. The show runs approximately 170 minutes, including two brief intermissions. Tickets are $16-$52.