NOW EXTENDED TO JULY 19th!
The Irish Repertory Theatre
in association with
The Vincent Dowling Theatre Company
presents
THE RIVALRY
by Norman Corwin
directed by Vincent Dowling
Performances:
Wednesday - Saturday at 8pm
Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday at 3pm
Call 212-727-2737 to order today!
What the Critics Have to Say...
"POWERFUL. COMPELLING."
Listening to Lincoln
by TERRY TEACHOUT
Most educated Americans have heard of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but how many
remember anything about them beyond the fact that they were about slavery? Even
if you’re not in need of a refresher course, I suggest you pay a visit to the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “The Rivalry,” Norman Corwin’s 1959 play about seven debates that changed a nation’s course. Yes, it’s a history lesson, but a painless one that, unlike most latter-day docudramas, sticks surprisingly close to the truth.
Mr. Corwin, who turned 99 last month, is a near-forgotten giant of golden-age radio, the author of “The Plot to Overthrow Christmas” and the man on whom CBS called in 1945 when it wanted to commission a play to celebrate V-E Day. After TV put an end to radio drama, Mr. Corwin turned to other pursuits, writing the screenplay for “Lust for Life,” Vincente Minnelli’s marvelous 1956 biopic about the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Three years later he took a shot at the legitimate stage with “The Rivalry,” which ran for only 81 performances on Broadway but has since had a vigorous afterlife in regional theaters around the country.
This is, so far as I know, the first time that “The Rivalry” has been given a professional revival in New York, and I can’t see why it took so long. To be sure, it’s more a pageant than a play—most of the running time is given over to the debates themselves, and Mr. Corwin has made only a token attempt to place them in a larger dramatic context—but the inherent drama of the encounters between Stephen A. Douglas (Peter Cormican) and Abraham Lincoln (Christian Kauffmann) is powerful enough to hold your attention without superfluous theatrical embellishment.
A short primer for readers with rusty memories: In 1859 Lincoln was seeking to dislodge Douglas from his Senate seat, and the two men appeared jointly throughout Illinois that summer and fall, arguing over whether the citizens of U.S. territories should be allowed to legalize slavery by popular vote. Douglas supported the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” while Lincoln believed slavery to be a “monstrous injustice” that stood in glaring contradiction to the belief that all men are created equal. At stake was the future of the Union—Southern states were already threatening to secede over the issue—and so the debates attracted nationwide attention and were reported in close detail by every major newspaper in America. Though Douglas retained his Senate seat, the resulting press coverage made Lincoln a celebrity and put him on the road to the White House.
To present even one of the original debates on stage would be hopelessly undramatic, since each encounter consisted of an hour-long address by the first speaker, a 90-minute response by the second speaker, and a 30-minute rebuttal by the first speaker. Instead Mr. Corwin has compressed the transcripts into a series of compact scenes, editing the rebuttals in such a way as to create the impression that Lincoln and Douglas interrupted one another at will. While that didn’t happen—the format of the debates didn’t allow for direct interaction between the two men—Mr. Corwin has otherwise given a fair impression of what was said on the platform. Not only is Douglas allowed to have his say, but no attempt is made to conceal the awkward fact that Lincoln, opposed as he was to slavery, still believed that blacks were inferior as a group to whites: “Certainly the Negro is not our equal in color—perhaps not in many other respects.”
So why not just stay home and read the transcripts? Because, among other things, you’ll be depriving yourself of the chance to see Mr. Kauffmann impersonate Lincoln. Not only does he bear a close physical resemblance to the man he plays, but his homespun, humorous acting is utterly plausible. Unlike the secular saint portrayed by Henry Fonda in John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln,” Mr. Kauffmann’s Lincoln is recognizably human, and even when he’s flinging great shafts of rhetoric across the platform, he still seems like a small-town lawyer who has been ennobled by fate. Mr. Cormican’s Douglas is more conventional—he plays the “Little Giant” as a strutting, overly self-confident bantamweight pol—but no less effective, and Mary Linda Rapelye is straightforward and strong as his anxious wife.
To watch Vincent Dowling’s pleasingly old-fashioned staging of “The Rivalry” is to be catapulted back to an unimaginable time when attention spans were longer and politicians more articulate. Indeed, it’s downright startling to hear the kind of language that was thought suitable to a public debate a century and a half ago. Lincoln and Douglas spoke not in easy-to-digest sound bites but in tightly woven webs of logic, and their listeners returned the compliment to their intelligence by hanging on every word. That, too, is one of the most compelling reasons to see “The Rivalry,” for it turns out that the best way to appreciate the extent to which political discourse has changed since 1859 is to take it in through the ear. I came away from “The Rivalry” asking myself a thoroughly discomfiting question: Are we dumber than our great-great-grandparents, or just lazier?
"COMPELLING THEATRE.
FINE PERFORMANCES!"
Great Debate of ’58:
Lincoln vs. Douglas
By NEIL GENZINGLER
The elections last year might have seemed unusually rife with issues and substance, what with the economy,
the war and the general historic significance of several candidacies. But to feel truly on the brink of something momentous, try a trip back to 1858, when Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debated both the survival
of the nation and the very nature of humankind as they battled for a United States Senate seat.
“The Rivalry,” a play by Norman Corwin, uses excerpts from those
debates and the barest minimum of side plot to turn history into
compelling theater. The play was seen on Broadway in 1959, when the words of Lincoln and Douglas had all sorts of relevance to the emerging civil rights movement. Now, of course, they have whole new layers of resonance, and the staging of the play by the Vincent Dowling Theater Company and the Irish Repertory Theater lets you savor them through
a pair of fine performances.
The play, directed by Mr. Dowling, focuses on Douglas more than on Lincoln, and Peter Cormican is just what you want in that role:
evenhanded, letting Douglas’s sometimes jarring words speak for
themselves. (The rants about racial purity are especially unsettling
today.)
But Christian Kauffmann’s Lincoln is ultimately what makes the play work. Mr. Kauffmann’s characterization grows on you, much as Lincoln must have grown on the public as a leader: he lost that 1858 election, but two years later he was chosen for what was certainly at the time the most difficult job in the world.
"THE RIVALRY IS A POWERFUL REMINDER
THAT POLITICS MATTER." - NY Post
"Seeing as "The Rivalry" depicts impassioned debates between two ambitious politicians, you'd be excused for expecting the Obama-Clinton faceoffs. But Norman Corwin's play concerns two other great debaters: Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who butted heads in 1858. Much more than a history lesson, "The Rivalry" is a powerful reminder that politics matter. In case you've forgotten, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held in Illinois, where both men were running for the US Senate. Although Lincoln lost, his reputation grew, thanks largely to the debate transcripts he had published, and he won the presidency two years later. The play really comes to life when it depicts the debaters' personalities, and in the tender scenes in which Lincoln and Douglas' loyal wife, Adele ("I don't trust Republicans," she declares), develop a warm friendship. The lanky Christian Kauffman, looking uncannily like Lincoln, beautifully conveys the future president's mixture of homespun humor and powerful convictions. Peter Cormican effectively suggests the famed charisma of Douglas ("the Little Giant"), and Mary Linda Rapelye is quietly moving as the devoted Adele."
"WONDERFUL. CHARMING."
- Associated Press
"Corwin's dramatization, playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre through July 5, of the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates skillfully uses excerpts from the oratory as transcribed at the time. Christian Kauffmann is a wonderful Lincoln, genial and lanky. Clownish at first, Kauffmann gains in gravitas as the debates progress. The story is narrated by Adele Douglas (an engaging Mary Linda Rapelye). It's a personal approach that draws the audience behind the scenes of the sometimes bombastic speechifying that takes place at the debate podiums. A devoted adviser to her husband, Rapelye's charming and intelligent Adele listens intently onstage to the debates. Reflecting the evolution in attitude of the American public, she eventually realizes value in Lincoln's views on slavery.
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