As Abraham Lincoln, David Selby has the weight of the union on his shoulders in “The Heavens Are Hung in Black.” Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

In the handy study guide that accompanies the world premiere production of The Heavens Are Hung in Black, now running at the newly reopened Ford’s Theatre, playwright James Still observes that his subject, Abraham Lincoln, is “probably the most written-about person in the world after Jesus.” If that’s true, then Still’s creaky but still richly rewarding drama more resembles the 16th president’s The Last Temptation of Christ than his New Testament: It’s a humanizing portrayal that ennobles its mighty subject by cutting him down to size.

You don’t expect a play commissioned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Great Emancipator’s birth (and to re-open the very theater where he was shot) to be anything more than a starry-eyed hagiography, but Still and actor David Selby, ably filling that famous beard, balance out the hero-worship by giving us plenty of Lincoln’s isolation, and awkwardness, and just sheer weirdness. The focus is on Lincoln’s sober, sleepless pragmatism rather than his private principle. “It’s arithmetic,” he says wearily, rejecting another plea from his cabinet to draft black men into the thinning Union ranks. After eight years of shoot-first, ask-questions-never, bookish Presidential hand-wringing has never seemed so sexy.