AMERICA:Former Abbey leading light Vincent Dowling is directing a timely staging of historic debates about equality, freedom and slavery, writes KEVIN CULLEN
BARACK OBAMA’S fledgling presidency has coincided with a resurgence of interest in, and the bicentennial of the birth of, a president Obama has gone to great lengths to emulate: Abraham Lincoln.
Obama launched his presidential campaign in Lincoln’s hometown in Illinois. He quoted Lincoln often on the campaign trail. He took a train to his inauguration, following the same route Lincoln took in 1861, and was sworn in with his hand resting on the same Bible Lincoln used at his inauguration. The inaugural luncheon featured a menu of Lincoln’s favourite dishes, including seafood stew.
All this newfound interest in Lincoln has also coincided with the revival of The Rivalry, a play about the famous debates between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858. The revival has been led by an unlikely Lincolnophile, Vincent Dowling, the former artistic director of the Abbey, who for the last two decades has run a small theatre company in rural western Massachusetts.
The play was written by a Boston native Norman Corwin whose radio plays from the 1940s and 1950s are considered American classics. Corwin was commissioned to write The Rivalry to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The way in which Dowling came to do the play suggests coincidence at least, and providence at most.
In October 2007, Dowling and his wife, Olwen, a painter and daughter of the late Abbey and Gate actor Dan O’Herlihy, were invited to a dinner at the Thousand Oaks Library in California to celebrate the golden days of American radio.
“Norman Corwin was there and I shook his hand, but I didn’t really get a chance to talk to him,” Dowling recalled, sitting in a Cambridge pub called The Field, after the play written by his old friend John B Keane.
“A month later, I was home, going through some old plays, trying to decide what we were going to put on the next season and I pulled out The Rivalry. There was no sign of where I had got it, or when I had got it, but I saw who had written it and thought, ‘That’s the man I met in California.’ Right then and there, I told myself that if it’s a small cast, I’ll do it. I opened it and saw it had a cast of three.” Besides Lincoln and Douglas, the play features Douglas’s wife, Adele.
When Dowling finished reading it, he had tears in his eyes, so moved was he by the themes of honour, duty and equality, and especially the tragedy that befell Douglas, who died young, the assassinated Lincoln, and a nation still cleaved along lines of politics and culture set a century and a half ago.
“As I read it, I thought, ‘This is about Obama and John McCain and Hillary Clinton. It’s some weird, prophetic thing,” Dowling said. “It was the election, not the Lincoln commemorations, that made this so relevant,” said Olwen, who when she isn’t painting is Dowling’s theatrical Girl Friday.
Dowling rang Corwin, seeking permission, and suggesting a few cuts in dialogue.
“The play is not a sausage,” the 98-year-old Corwin replied.
Dowling bowed, much as Lincoln did to Douglas when ceding the floor, and the play is word for word as originally written. Corwin, by the way, will celebrate his 100th birthday this year. The play’s biggest surprise is not its highlighting of Lincoln’s greatness, which is widely accepted, but Douglas’s.
“Where I was reared, we thought of Douglas as the bad guy,” Dowling said. “But he was a great American.” Douglas was as determined as Lincoln to avoid civil war. His defence of slavery, and especially his belief in the innate inferiority of anyone who wasn’t white, sounds cringe-inducing today, but was conventional wisdom of the time.
In contrast, Lincoln’s ringing defence of the notion of equality seems way ahead of its time.
Douglas won the Illinois senate seat that was at stake in 1858, but Lincoln won the presidency when they faced off on a national stage two years later. Despite the vitriol of their debates, Lincoln and Douglas became close friends and allies, another lesson that Dowling values in the play.
Douglas stood behind Lincoln and held Lincoln’s signature stovepipe hat at the inauguration. And in his last political act, Douglas went to Illinois at Lincoln’s behest and prevented the state from joining the Confederacy.
Besides the Abbey, Dowling has acted and directed in some of the world’s most prestigious venues, from Moscow to the White House. But listening to him talk about taking The Rivalry to humble venues throughout Massachusetts, you get the impression he has never felt more fulfilled. On Lincoln’s 200th birthday on Thursday, the play was performed at the Massachusetts State House.
“About 1,200 students between the ages of seven and 17 have seen this run. That’s what keeps me going,” Dowling said.
“Any kid who sees this play will have a different idea about politics, and it will be a better idea of politics. The themes celebrated in this play, it’s the America that got me over here in the first place. It’s the America that people in Ireland and all over the world love.”
For the last 20 years, Dowling and his wife have lived in Chester, a small, secluded hill town in western Massachusetts. The theatre company he founded there is a labour of love, not money.
Chester borders a smaller town called Becket. “You know,” Vincent Dowling said, a twinkle in his eye, “I haven’t given up on the idea of starting a Beckett Theatre in Becket.”
Olwen O’Herlihy Dowling rolled her eyes.
“I have,” she said.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe