I know this isn’t a very round anniversary, but ten years ago (at the 150th), Travalanche hadn’t much expanded beyond vaudeville and silent film comedy as far as subject matter was concerned. We have grown.
I have of course made a couple of pilgrimages to Ford’s Theatre and Petersen House (across the street, where Lincoln died several hours after being shot), but that was long before I was a blogger. And yet this tragedy is theatre related. One is tempted to call the Lincoln assassination the worst thing that ever happened in a theatre…until you remember all of those terrible fires (like this one and this one), not to mention things like stampedes and mass shootings that have happened at concert venues. But if you include in your tally the loss to human progress caused by the fact that Lincoln was not around to shepherd Reconstruction, the cost of the assassination may count as the worst even so.
Though I have not written about the event per se, I have written around it, so I refer you to these previous posts:
On Laura Keene, Star of Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln Was Watching
On Joseph Jefferson, Also in the Play That Night
We must admit that the precipitating cause of this post is that our hilarious friend Kevin Maher has written a satirical comedy sketch about the actors’ predicament that night, re-imagined with a contemporary sensibility. I can attest that ones very much like it happened on September 11, and always happen whenever bad shit goes down, because, as my wife is so fond of saying, “actors are the WORST”. Read it on Slackjaw here.