Theatre

Interview

Mrs President: “A lot of people wouldn’t want to believe that a woman can shape a great man”

We chat to writer, artist and historian John Ransom Phillips about how Mary Lincoln, wife of Abraham, deserves to be remembered


“Behind every great man is a great woman” goes the expression, and it’s one with which John Ransom Phillips takes umbrage.

The playwright started as a painter, from which he branched out into various mediums – “Everything demands a different kind of response, so I try to be ready,” he says, from his study in New York. Experiments with writing on his watercolours led him towards the stage – “After a while I wanted the words spoken, and so what is that but theatre?” His latest production, Mrs President, combines his love of art and history, questioning what it means for the former to define the latter. The play centers around Mary Lincoln’s meeting with celebrity photographer Matthew Brady, who she enlists to take her portrait, presumably in an attempt to redefine her public image and her legacy. A century and a half later, Phillips gives her a second chance to do exactly that.

We sat down with Phillips to discuss his idea of who Mary Lincoln really was, and why she deserves to be remembered.  

MRS. PRESIDENT | Trailer

You began your career as an artist. How did you first start transforming those writings on watercolours into scripts?

I was in Egypt, and I started valuing English, because my Arabic was very poor, and so I started writing, in time, independent of the visual images. I liked that idea. I liked the idea that the visual images led to words, and then the words stood alone, and so then I went that way. It’s kind of an adventure. But I paint every day and I write every day. It’s different parts of my brain I try to tap.

How involved are you in creating the visuals of your stage productions?

I’ve been privy only to one of the rehearsals, so it’s quite a separate thing. You kind of put it out into the world and let the directors do their thing. That’s what’s curious is that theatre is so collaborative. Who are all these people, the lighting people, the costumes, the makeup, the actors, the director? Everyone wants to make it their own, and rightly. I’m overwhelmed by all these people, because when you paint, you’re all by yourself, and you don’t look for advice in the process of making a painting. It’s so different, and I like it for that, but I’m not used to the collaboration in theatre as much as the solitariness in painting.

Do you enjoy letting go and letting this massive cast of collaborators take over?

When they’re good. What good actors will do is they will amplify what I’ve written, and some of them will say, “I can’t say this, John, can I substitute these words?” That’s wonderful, because they come with a freshness and with an understanding of the spoken word much more fully than I do, because I’m home and I’m writing and I think, “Gee, this sounds good, this is brilliant,” and it’s not because in the theatre you have an audience, and it sometimes just hangs there. So writers need directors. We need actors.

Where did your interest in Mary Lincoln begin?

I’ve been fascinated by women who are identified almost fully with their husbands. Mary Lincoln is the most hated of all first ladies, Jackie Kennedy being the most loved. I wondered, why is this? I wanted to tell her story – she’s always perceived of as an appendage of her husband, who is very famous all over the world, and so she was a woman in the beginning who didn’t know who she was. Where do we go when we don’t know who we are?

Well, in her case, she went to a celebrity photographer, one of the first, named Matthew Brady, and he had helped make her husband Abraham Lincoln president. That, of course, was what I think she wanted to have done for her. What happens is she goes and she discovers two things: that she doesn’t really know who she is – that’s very common for all of us – and secondly, that this man, an artist, is a little crazy. He’s half blind. How can a half blind artist see the truth of who someone is a subject? The play is about their struggle of who will define her, who will prevail. Of course, we are the best people to interpret ourselves, and so at the end of the play, she takes her own photograph, which is unheard of. You don’t go to a photographer and then ultimately overrule him.

I think one of the most important lines of the play is she says, “How do you see me, Mr. Brady?” and he says, “I don’t, I don’t see you at all. I imagine you.” What that means, I think, is he sees what he wants to see. He sees with his imagination. Whatever the truth is, it’s not about her, it’s about him. Artists do that, be careful of them, because they will imagine things that are lovely and beautiful or appropriate to their vision, but maybe less to do with you.

There’s a lot of misinformation about Mary Lincoln. How did you go about defining her on the page?

I’ve read a lot about her, and I value my dreams, and she came to me in a dream many times, and what I did was I would talk to her in the dream. What a life. Her mother died when she was very young, and there was the evil stepmother. Stepped in with her own children. She was marginalized. She became a mother. She buried three sons. The fourth son – the oldest, Robert – betrayed her, had her arrested and put in an asylum. She was declared insane. She witnessed her husband’s assassination with blood all over her and people then conclude that this woman is unraveling. She’s crazy. She believed in the spirit world, and she wanted to have her three children return to the spirits. That’s all the makings of what we could too readily call insanity. I want to resurrect this woman. I want to see her as a full person who is trying to understand who she is and at the same time is experiencing a profound grief that only a mother can understand. I think she’s not crazy. She felt her feelings, and that sometimes gets you into trouble.

As a historian and an artist, when you’re navigating all that tragedy and you’re working out what kind of person that might have made her into, are those two identities of yours ever at odds? History versus the story you want to tell?

You mean the historical Mary and my Mary?

I suppose so, yes.

I think my Mary is true. I want to tell her story, because I think her story’s never been told. In the many, many books written about her, it’s always about how she was insane. She was hated. But this is the paradox. She loved clothes. So did Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy witnessed her husband’s assassination. Mary Lincoln did as well. Why is one woman called insane and the other woman loved? I think in part, it has to do with men. Certain men in history don’t feel the need – Churchill being one – of having a wife explain who they are. Clementine Churchill was a helpmate, and we see her always on the sidelines. So too with Mary Lincoln. She’s always on the sidelines. Lincoln and Churchill don’t need to be explained through their wives. John Kennedy does, and consequently, we get the whole idea of Mrs. Kennedy: very beautiful, appearing in such a way, and witnessing heroically her husband’s assassination. She’s loved, the other woman is hated. I think this is one of the problems of women today, is they’re always perceived terms of men, so I’ve taken a quintessential American hero, Abraham Lincoln, and seen him by not seeing him, by excluding him from this play. He does not appear and rightly, because this is her story.

Do you feel that her story reflects on Lincoln? Does her story make us change our minds about what kind of man Lincoln might have been?

She lived with him so many years and that they helped shape one another. Is that surprising? A lot of people wouldn’t want to believe that a woman can shape a great man. They frequently say there’s a woman behind a mother or a wife or daughter behind every great man, which is sort of sexist. I believe that they shared a lot, both of them, Lincoln and Mary. They lost their mothers at an early age. They both loved poetry. They both loved the theatre. They both loved politics. I think she helped to shape him. To what degree we will never know. She herself asks that someone admit the fact that she did. She did shape him, and he shaped her, but that’s hard to accept, because Lincoln doesn’t need anybody to explain him, certainly not a woman who’s crazy. Hopefully this play will open up those possibilities of seeing her in a new way, in her own way.

Quite a few publications have called this a feminist story. Is that how you see it?

Well, if that’s what feminism is, sure. It’s a woman who experienced great misfortune, external and internal misfortune, and then became overwhelmed, and in the process, was called crazy, and tries to find out who she is, because ultimately, who decides who we are are? Is it the taste makers, the branders, the interviewers in life? Who decides who we are? I’m not deciding who she is. I have certain feelings about her. I like her. I find her heroic, but ultimately, I think we decide who we are by asking ourselves those questions. It’s a process that takes your whole life, and at the end of the play, she no longer depends on him, she never looks to clothes to define her, and she takes her own picture, and it’s not a selfie. A selfie is some projection, isn’t it, of how you would like other people to see you. You know, you fix yourself in a way, and frequently it’s untrue. We don’t know what the picture looks like, but the fact that she’s taking her own picture is enough.

I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about the character of Matthew Brady and the role that he plays.

Matthew Brady is based on artists that I know. Should I include myself? We have visions. Some artists obviously look around and are portraying what they see. Many artists don’t have to look, like Brady. They have to look into their imagination, and they’re frequently fixated on certain images, certain ideas, and they spend their whole life, in some sense, expanding these images, exploring them, trying to understand them.

There’s a very famous story that Gertrude Stein, the writer, asked Picasso to paint her portrait, and at that time, he was exploring African masks. When he came to paint Gertrude Stein, he gave her an African mask face which had absolutely nothing to do with her, but that was what he was working on, because he wasn’t looking as much as seeing inside. When she saw it, she said, “That doesn’t look like me.” His famous line – whether it’s true, I don’t know – is, “It will. It will look like you, because that’s what people will in time believe. Because I’m famous. Picasso is famous. They will remember my interpretation of you more than what you think you are yourself.” That’s, in a way, tragic, but it’s appropriate to what artists do.

I feel Mary’s spirit. I’m telling her story. It is the story of feminism, of a woman demanding to be understood in their own terms. It’s a tragic story, and maybe the worst person in the world to go to, and I shouldn’t maybe say this, but the worst person is an artist to interpret you, because he will interpret you in terms of who he is. In the play, he comes up with different images from his head in order to see her, and she rejects all of these so that ultimately, she will do her own portrait, and he will she will no longer depend on him.

Why do you think the real Mary deserves to be remembered?

Mary deserves to be remembered because while she suffered terribly, from being almost an orphan to a mother of dead children to being arrested and declared insane to witnessing her husband’s death in a violent manner, she persisted and ultimately prevailed. What got her in trouble was that she felt her feelings, but when we feel our feelings fully, then we are on the road to understanding who we are, and only we can define or describe who we are. This is a portrait of Mary in the beginning, painted by Brady, but ultimately painted by Mary herself. It’s a portrait of truth.


Mrs President will play at the Charing Cross Theatre from 31 January to 16 March. Find tickets here.