Presidential Snipshots

The White House takes playgoers on an anecdotal tour of the private lives of U.S. Presidents and their First Ladies.

It combines the shallower features of a dramatic reading and a TV documentary. To cover the presidential span from Washington through Wilson, scenes and episodes have to be scissored to candid-camera snipshots. While painless history is the mood, the recurring theme, insofar as there is one, is that sorrow, great loneliness and sometimes tragedy are the permanent occupants of the house on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Sadness dominates the dramatic high point of the evening. Mary Todd Lincoln (Helen Hayes) is undergoing a jury trial to determine her sanity. With an obvious desire to be frank, she begins to link any strangeness in her behavior to the inconsolable loss of three sons and the assassinated Abe. Just as the artless conviction of her account is taking hold, a spasm of madness shatters her face in fragments as if an earthquake had jaggedly ripped open the mind's thin crust. As Lincoln, Fritz Weaver brings timely eloquence to a pithy debate on civil rights.

Too much of The White House is stuffed with incidental trivia of the did-you-know variety: President Arthur was known as "His Accidency"; U. S. Grant found his wife's crossed eyes rather endearing; Andrew Jackson's wife ordered an inaugural veil with the name JACKSON stitched in lace letters from ear to ear; Mrs. Benjamin Harrison had 2,000 azalea plants delivered daily. A supple cast treats this material with greater respect than it merits, but The White House remains less of a tribute to the nation's highest office than a gossipy raid on its prestige.

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