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Mary Todd Lincoln: Shadows

2008

Mary Todd Lincoln: Shadows is an intimate one-woman drama that finds the former First Lady alone in an upstairs parlor of the White House in September of 1867, packing to leave for good. With only a table and a chair, the trunks half-filled and the wagons not yet arrived, Mary Todd Lincoln pauses to take stock of a life — and to share that moment with the audience she suddenly turns to address.

What begins as the brisk, irritable business of leave-taking becomes a tender excavation of memory. Mary recalls the couple's first humble home at the Globe Tavern in Springfield — an eight-by-fourteen-foot room above a stage line, four dollars a week with meals at a common table — and the "Fatal First," the broken engagement she ended with a stamped foot and "Go, and never come back." She traces their unlikely second courtship, conducted in part through the anonymous "Rebecca Letters" in the Sangamon Journal, and the strange peace offering Abraham once handed her: a ribbon-tied roll of old election returns she cherished more than any bouquet. "Molly, you smell like roses," he would tell her.

The shadows of the title fall across the play's later turns: the plunder of the Lincolns' belongings after the assassination, the disappearance of even Abraham's pet goats, the deaths of the children, and the grief that Mary carried in mourning dress for the rest of her days. Built from careful historical research, the piece lets a much-maligned woman speak in her own voice — proud, witty, wounded, and unwilling to leave behind the few keepsakes that hold her heart.

Production Notes

• The script is a single-character monologue set in the White House, September 1867, as Mary Todd Lincoln prepares to depart.
• Developed from extensive historical research, including notes drawn from Jean Baker's biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and a study of Abraham Lincoln's favorite poems — among them William Knox's "Mortality" ("Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?") and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "The Last Leaf," both of which Lincoln loved and often recited.
• The drama deliberately concentrates on the courtship, marriage, and aftermath of the assassination rather than the later asylum episode or Tad's death, keeping the focus on memory and loss.