Mrs. Surratt?

As noted in the sidebar, I'll be playing Mary Surratt in Rich's play The Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt, which we'll be performing near the actual Surratt House for the Surratt House Museum Conference. As a bit of a history buff myself my biggest concern isn't overacting or messing up the lines (as he is also our director, we'll let those be Rich's concerns about me), it's playing someone that everyone in the room knows better than I do. Shakespeare and G&S audiences are often off-book, but the actor still has a few advantages. That may not be so here.

I remember when I was young and the "Little House" books were turned into a tv movie and then a series. Literalist that I am, I was dismayed at all the things that they got "wrong." The absence of Pa's beard was just one of those things and probably the most minor. Like almost every historical tv series, Little House was a modern family dressed in old clothes, so these erstaz Ingallses had all the beliefs and opinions of 1970s California rather than 1870s Kansas. The only characters that seemed true to the books were the awful Olson family. The show lost my interest pretty quickly. And don't even get me started on Doctor Quinn, Medicine Chick.

My job with this play is to tell the story of a woman who may or may not have been complicit in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but whose only bargaining chip with the prosecutors is the whereabouts (if she knows them) of her son. And, like every Tennessee Williams heroine, she doesn't help herself much with her stubborn belief that she can control events by clinging to how a well-bred lady expects to be treated. (Clearly, she hasn't seen as much Law and Order as I have.) She's trying to win a chess game in which the opposition has a full board and she has two pawns.

But if what I do while I'm moving and talking violates what the audience knows about 19th century women in general and Mary Surratt in specific, it won't necesssarily matter how well I translate the story. And while mine is the title story, it's not the only one we're playing. If Johnny's whereabouts are Mary's only chip, they are also the chip that the prosecution most wants to win. Mary was less a chess player and more a pawn in her own story.

Oy.

"Oy," of course, is a word that 19th century, country-girl, Catholic Mary would not grok at all. And she actually says things like "I declare," which is just as foreign to me.

Not sure how I'm going to accomplish this yet. Wish me luck.