British-American freelance director Lily Wolff is bringing Mrs President to this year’s Fringe. The play gives Mary, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, the chance to tell her own story for the first time. I spoke to Lily ahead of her arrival in Edinburgh to find out more about her own background, the play and Mary Lincoln.
Lily, thank you for joining me. Can we start with your story of how you came to be where you are today? What’s the Anglo-American background and what attracted you to becoming a director?
I grew up in Cornwall, England. My parents are both American ex-pats, so I’ve always had a foot in both places – more so in England during my childhood and more in America as an adult. Like many theatre-makers, my first exposure to theatre was through performing. While most kids were playing games on the playground, I was forming a theatre company and rehearsing Romeo and Juliet. Popular I was not, but I’ve always had a fairly singular focus. In college, my acting professor had to practically beg me to take a directing class. There’s a lot of peer-to-peer feedback in acting classes and my feedback came more in the form of direction. It took some convincing, but once I finally took that first directing class, it was like stepping into my skin. I felt like I had a place, something to say, and like I was able to be fully, artistically myself.
Let’s do a little more background, this time on the playwright, John Ransom Phillips. What can you tell us about him?
John has enjoyed a long and successful career as a visual artist. He’s been writing plays for 10-15 years now and I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with him on his scripts since November of last year. He’s incredibly well-read and a deeply curious, intellectual human. Many of his creative projects have emerged from studying various figures and moments in history. Mrs President is one of those projects.
Which brings us to the play, that gives voice to the wife of the well-known President and the subject of many books and films in which she appears often as just a minor character. Who was she? Did she play a major role or did she meekly exist in the background?
Mary was the wife of Abraham Lincoln, the President who led the United States during the American Civil War and brought an end to chattel slavery. Here are just some of the facts about Mary Lincoln’s life that keep me up at night.
Her mother died when she was six. She was raised in a home with 15 siblings after her father remarried. Three of her four children died. She suffered a prolapsed uterus, about which nothing much was done back then. Less than a week after the war ended, during an evening at the theatre she saw her husband shot and watched him slowly die that night. Her surviving son ambushed her with an insanity trial and sent her to an asylum against her will.
I find the fact that she survived all of this astounding. She certainly experienced suffering, yet rather than feeling sorry for her, history seems to have treated her rather badly.
What was her reputation then and now?
In a way, the question of why she was and is still so reviled is what drives me to tell this story. While there are many sources that point to her temper, her opulence, the suspicion she faced as a southerner whose own brothers fought against her husband’s army, she was also a smart, highly educated woman with political passion and ambition living at a time when women could not even participate in their nation’s democracy in the most fundamental way – by voting. She was never able to be herself. Ever.
To what extent was her vilification due to her being a woman – would a man have endured the same treatment?
I think this is one of the important questions the play asks. It was certainly extremely difficult to be a smart woman with ambitions beyond the home in Mary Lincoln’s time. It was also unacceptable to mourn openly, honestly and in the raw and desperate manner that Mary mourned her children. It was seen as questioning God’s will; putting yourself above him. A man would have never endured the same treatment. Women were absolutely second-class citizens in the United States at that time. They were bound to their husbands, bound by their clothes (restrictive corsets and enormous, unruly hoop skirts), and had no vote or real rights to property, either.
A key figure in her story and that of her husband’s is the photographer Mathew Brady. Can you explain his role in the lives of the Lincolns?
Mathew Brady was a celebrity photographer in the mid-1800s. He took photographs of famous figures, but he also became famous himself through his work. He was sort of like the Annie Leibovitz of the time. Not stylistically, but in terms of status. If you were a famous American, you’d likely been to Mathew Brady’s photography studio. Brady took a famous portrait of Lincoln during a campaign speech at the Cooper Union. It was a real turning point in his campaign. After winning the election Lincoln said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President”. What a thing to say, right? He did not have a reputation as the most handsome presidential candidate… but Brady’s portrait made him more appear approachable, smoothed out some of his harder edges, and helped the public see him as the great leader he was meant to be. He went on to photograph the entire Lincoln family. And that’s where our story begins.
Photography was still in its early days at this time, yet he grasped its potential in the political and social arena, so I suppose he could be regarded as a pioneer of photojournalism?
Certainly. Washington, DC is a microcosm of all politics, which is so heavily influenced by perception. Mathew Brady saw the power of photography in shaping perceptions and traded on it with great success. Mary Lincoln saw what Brady’s image of her husband did, and, having no power of her own, sought some of that power to change her circumstances. What transpires forges the story of Mrs President.
Does this play tell us something universal about the ability or inability of women to control their own image and narrative?
While this play is a woman’s story, and the history shows how unfairly women have been (and still are) treated, the struggle to control one’s own image and narrative is universal. Who controls the image? Artist or subject? Who has controlled the narrative of history for Mary Lincoln? Hers is a case-study examining the incongruencies and inequalities inherent in our history, culture, and perceptions. People will just be able to enjoy Mrs President as a story.
What else would you like them to take away from seeing it?
I hope that our play can challenge people to question why someone’s story is told the way it’s told. What was the person’s life like? Who had the power to participate in storytelling? In history? And how do we participate in that legacy of storytelling today and in the future?
