"O Captain, My Captain,' at Walnut Studio 3

Walt Whitman was a poet in the best sense: He perceived poetry in the grubby struggles of the modern world's first emerging democracy. Where others saw purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain, Whitman saw the majesty of ordinary people asserting their rights as citizens. Where others saw crowded and impersonal cities, Whitman saw places where one's imagination could run rampant— where a man could, if he chose, walk along a street and fantasize about making love to every passing stranger. And while others denounced Abraham Lincoln as a backwoods politician, Whitman hitched his poetic wagon to "the hero standing in our midst," even though the two men never met.

Whitman's post-assassination embrace of Lincoln was surely an opportunistic way to salvage his flagging career, and Bill Van Horn's one-man show, O Captain, My Captain, appears to have sprung largely from an opportunistic desire to exploit the coming celebration of Lincoln's 200th birthday. But as Whitman amply demonstrated, there's something to be said for opportunism: Without Whitman's worshipful paeans, the full dimension of Lincoln's greatness might never have been explored. Van Horn is hardly the first stage Whitman impersonator, but his emphasis on the Whitman-Lincoln connection works as both a useful innovation and a dramatic device.

At home in Camden

In effect Van Horn invites the audience to spend an evening in the parlor of Whitman's Camden home, richly furnished with stuffed sofas, Victorian bric-a-brac and period photos and paintings. It's 1887; Whitman's housekeeper in the next room is playing the pianoforte; and the great poet, now 68 and perhaps fed up with his constant identification with Lincoln, takes one last crack at justifying the legend he has wrought.

In 90 mostly engrossing minutes he paints a series of word-scenes from the last eight years of Lincoln's life: The Dred Scott case that made the Civil War inevitable, Lincoln's 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the four-way presidential election campaign of 1860, Lincoln's furtive arrival in Washington (to avoid an assassination plot), the two inaugural addresses, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Whitman's search in an army field hospital for his own wounded brother George, and of course Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth, which Whitman/Horn portrays in vivid detail.

Is Whitman's take on these events— as interpreted by Van Horn— all that different from any other historian's? I think not. But if the Whitman gimmick suffices to lure you into the Walnut's Independence Studio, you'll be better for the experience. (Did you know, for example, that Booth was Lincoln's favorite actor?)

A few historical stretches

Perhaps for dramatic purposes, Horn's presentation sometimes stretches historical facts. He describes Dred Scott as "a slave who was brought North" (Scott was owned by a peripatetic army surgeon whose postings took him from Illinois to Wisconsin to Missouri and then to Louisiana). He has South Carolina seceding after Lincoln arrives in the White House (South Carolina had already seceded ten weeks earlier). He refers to Lincoln as a "well-known Brown supporter" (speaking in Kansas on the day of John Brown's execution— December 2, 1859— Lincoln told his audience that Brown had been hung "and he ought to have been hung…. even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong").

But these are minor quibbles. "The past is a foreign country," wrote L.P. Hartley in the famous opening line of The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." Horn does a nice job of transporting us, for one evening, back to a country we rarely visit.


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