‘Why did you do it, Johnny?” asks the Balladeer in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which forced John Wilkes Booth to share the limelight with a slew of other slayers. Now Abraham Lincoln’s killer explains himself at length in Land of the Free, a deft and resourceful new play by the Simple8 company.
The ironies are a gift to any dramatist. Lincoln and Booth were both theatre nuts: Booth was an actor from a thespian family, and the president had seen him perform at Ford’s theatre, where they would have their fateful last meeting. But it’s how the director Sebastian Armesto and co-writer Dudley Hinton wrap, unwrap and rewrap that gift which enhances the material. Booth’s life is played out once in the first act, starting with a childhood performance of Julius Caesar, then revisited in the second with a shift of emphasis and a variety of theatrical forms: Shakespearean iambic pentameter, the odd musical number.
