Pretty Words: Ford's The Rivalry
Robert Parsons, Rick Foucheux and Sarah Zimmerman in "The Rivalry." Photo by T.Charles-Erickson.
It was a classic case of the lanky, brainy, agitating underdog versus the stouter, more experienced, more appeasement-minded line-tower.
But must we reopen O'Brien v. Leno while the wounds are still fresh?
Then let us confab instead, my fellow Americans, about The Rivalry, Ford's Theatre's often-clunky, still-stirring remount of radio great Norman Corwin's 1958 dramatization of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of a century earlier. The show opened directly opposite the State of the Union address the other night, and not the least of its charms is its reminder that however imperiled our union may at present be, it could be — and has been — worse.
But how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Not quite as intriguing as its more contemplative year-old bookend — the original commission The Heavens Are Hung in Black, which showed us the later, insomniac, hand-wringing Lincoln — but still a perfectly justifiable expenditure of two-and-a-half hours. Especially if you read Assassination Vacation twice and then listened to the audio version.
Full disclosure: I wandered down into Ford's basement museum during intermission, and found myself transfixed by the video of Presidents Carter, Bush 41, Clinton, and even, impossibly, Bush 43, reading the Gettysburg Address. So I am perhaps unusually susceptible to this sort of thing. But if presidential history or political oratory hooks you even a little, watching Robert Parsons (disarmingly cornpone and ungainly as Lincoln) and Rick Foucheux (Douglas, all dignity and swagger) cover some deep cuts from two masters of the form is a pleasure with malice toward none.
Corwin sewed together The Rivalry largely Moises Kaufman-style, using transcripts of the 1858 campaign wherein Lincoln challenged and lost to Douglas, a two-term incumbent, for one of Illinois' seats in the U.S. Senate. Lincoln sought to dethrone Douglas for his support for the (effectively) pro-slavery Dred Scott decision the year before.
Rick Foucheux as Stephen Douglas and Sarah Zimmerman as Adele Douglas. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
But back to the present: Foucheux always commands our attention, and he’s sublime as Douglas, the “little giant” of Illinois politics, at least until the debates are done. When his wife, Adele — our all-seeing narrator, gracefully embodied by Sarah Zimmerman — protests that she doesn’t want to attend the opening debate, he cajoles her, “you have far more constituents than I do,” then seals the deal with an Al-and-Tipper Gore-at-the-2000 DNC-style kiss. Quel homme!
Director Mark Ramont loses a few points for using goofy cheering-crowd sound effects to segue from one debate to the next. And the climax, wherein we skip ahead a few years to now-President Lincoln dispatching the sickly Douglas back to Illinois to quell a burgeoning secessionist movement, feels overplayed.
Douglas was a man of duty, enervated both by his failing health and by the advancing specter of a Civil War he'd spent years trying to avert. Perhaps because Foucheux — one of D.C.'s most reliably thrilling thespians — gets his vanity so right in the preceding scenes, it’s a little hard to buy his complete subservience to Lincoln, with whom he’d by then been competing, in one way or another, for close to 30 years. (Douglas courted Mary Todd before she married the future Commander-in-Chief.) But are these concerns of weight enough to splinter the union? We'll let the 16th president handle that one:
"That argument is just about as thin as the soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that starved to death!"
His humor was, like Conan’s, an acquired taste.
The Rivalry by Norman Corwin, directed by Mark Raymont, is at Ford's Theatre through Feb. 14. Run time is approximately two hours, including one intermission. Tickets are available here.