Static but not uninvolving look at Honest Abe's early years, when hard drinking, impetuousness, awkwardness and crippling self-limitation nearly consigned the future present to law-practice oblivion. Within each scene, Robert E. Sherwood works up a good lather - be it about Lincoln's tragic romances or the political arguments with friends and opponents. It's the between-scene craft that falters most. At the end of act one, we suffer dutifully with Abe as he mourns the loss of his true love, Ann Rutledge (Marissa Chibas). Only during intermission do we realize that Sherwood has given us no dramatic hook into the rest of the play. Instead, he relies on our foreknowledge of history to keep us interested. Since fewer people know history in 1993 than did in 1938, Abe Lincoln in Illinois begins to feel coagulated in the places where, one guesses, it once was majestic. That said, Sherwood does give us an effective (if overlong) Lincoln-Douglas debate, a dynamic election night and a more-than-skin-deep look at Lincoln's marriage to Mary Todd (Lizabeth MacKay). Though director Gerald Gutierrez leaves us with the unforgettable final image of Lincoln on a train fading into the fog of history, he also makes the unforgivable sin of putting the actors' backs to us, again and again, even when they're speaking. However naturalistic such staging may be, it's intrusive and therefore undramatic. Supporting performances here are surprisingly spotty, but Brian Reddy's a preeningly fine Stephen Douglas, and Sam Waterston, though relying too often on a strangulated squawk to express anger, comes through with a vivid, even heroic portrait of the canniest bumpkin in political history.
