Buckets of Tears

By T.E.K.

THE LAST OF MRS. LINCOLN

by JAMES PRIDEAUX

History is so dramatic, people frequently say. Apart from Shakespeare's works, there is scarcely a historical play in the entire canon of Western dramatic art worth an aesthetic hoot. An in toxication with history in the theater usually means that someone with the dramatic imagination of a file-card clerk has wandered into the library stacks and gone on a binge with a book.

The effect is sometimes a calumny, as when a Rolf Hochhuth claimed in Soldiers that Churchill engineered the murder of the head of the Polish government in exile. More often, it is stultifyingly frivolous and sentimental. The afterimage of a Victoria Regina or an Abe Lincoln in Illinois consists mostly of the unsettling idea that Queen Victoria was really Helen Hayes and the Great Emancipator was really Ray mond Massey. If anyone manages to remember The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, it will be with the conviction that Mary Todd Lincoln was really Julie Harris.

If the Harris mannerisms have not palled on you, attend and worship. After her own fashion, she is superb. She does a highly affecting monologue on the ghastly, ghostly ordeal of Mary Lincoln's life abroad. She watches her son Tad dying and dies herself very prettily.

It's a three-handkerchief show, and if the theater should ever catch fire, there will be buckets of tears handy with which to douse it.

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