With the turbulent politics of America daily hitting the news, Simple 8 takes us to the infamous assassination of President Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth.
Wooden pillars on either side of the stage are hung with pictures. Prominent on one side is a picture of Trump, clenched fist in the air after his near assassination. The picture high on the other side shows the body of Kennedy slumped in a car having been shot in Dallas. Other placards take us through the different dates being covered in their show.
The central storyline follows Booth (Brandon Bassir) from a childhood having fun doing Shakespeare with his family in a household where an often absent father treats him harshly to his death in a burning barn on 26 April 1865, just 15 days after he killed Lincoln.
His father, irritated, arrives to the stage where John Wilkes is play-acting with his brother Edwin and sister Asia. His manner is severe and impatient, his voice exaggerated as if talking to his family was a practice for some stage melodrama.
During the play, we glimpse bits of John Wilkes's acting, his anger at Lincoln's threat to end slavery, his courtship of two women, to one of whom he proposes marriage, and finally his escape after jumping onto the stage of Ford’s Theatre where he had just shot Lincoln shouting “sic semper tyrannis”.
Although that could have been the end of the play, we have a postscript detour to Thomas H "Boston" Corbett, the soldier who shot him dead in the Virginia barn he’d been hiding.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only detour from the meat of a story. There are also some earlier reflections on the history of the American National Anthem and discussions on the lighting of the Statue of Liberty.
There is also little development of any thematic purpose in the play. On the Civil War and slavery, we learn little more than John Wilkes's support of the South and the continuation of slavery, while Lincoln headed the forces of the North and claims he would prefer slavery would just die away.
The lively cast of seven performs thirty-two parts clearly. If you dropped around for any ten minutes of the show, it would grab and hold your attention. The problem is, it feels like a collection of disconnected fragments with no common purpose beyond the name of John Wilkes Booth.