Ford's Theater reopens next week after 18 months of work
Could any assassination have been more overtly theatrical? It’s where Alfred Hitchcock must have gotten some of his ideas. But stand inside Ford’s Theater, which is reopening here next week after 18 months of renovation, as part of the first stage in the creation of an extensive museum devoted to Lincoln, and the reality becomes even more extraordinary.
Barely 12 feet above the stage’s floor is the balustrade on which Lincoln collapsed after John Wilkes Booth shot a bullet from a .44-caliber Deringer into the back of his skull. The presidential box is draped with flags, as it was on that Good Friday evening, April 14, 1865. Hanging at the center of the balcony’s front wall, displayed for actors and audience, is the same framed portrait of Washington above which Lincoln sat.
Later, when I am led into the box itself, the theater’s director, Paul R. Tetreault, points out that the picture’s frame is nicked on its upper left side — a mark left by Booth’s spur as he leapt down onto the stage. And in the narrow arena of the box, it all becomes plausible. The comic play “Our American Cousin” would have been droning on below as Booth, who had sneaked in, silently pulled the red carpet aside to find the pine bar from a music stand he had secreted there earlier; he used it to jam the door shut.
Read entire article at NYT
Barely 12 feet above the stage’s floor is the balustrade on which Lincoln collapsed after John Wilkes Booth shot a bullet from a .44-caliber Deringer into the back of his skull. The presidential box is draped with flags, as it was on that Good Friday evening, April 14, 1865. Hanging at the center of the balcony’s front wall, displayed for actors and audience, is the same framed portrait of Washington above which Lincoln sat.
Later, when I am led into the box itself, the theater’s director, Paul R. Tetreault, points out that the picture’s frame is nicked on its upper left side — a mark left by Booth’s spur as he leapt down onto the stage. And in the narrow arena of the box, it all becomes plausible. The comic play “Our American Cousin” would have been droning on below as Booth, who had sneaked in, silently pulled the red carpet aside to find the pine bar from a music stand he had secreted there earlier; he used it to jam the door shut.