Ever heard of the Great American People Show? No, it’s not that group of fresh-faced kids who tour the country singing cornball songs. And it’s not the revue you see at Six Flags amusement park.
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All right, now it sounds even worse than Up With People, right? But GAPS’s Abraham Lincoln is not a tall guy in a stovepipe hat who walks onstage and shoots a turkey. Notwithstanding its possibly unfortunate name, the Great American People Show was founded by a group of young theater upstarts who transplanted themselves to the backwoods near Petersburg, Illinois, to create a work of art based on Brechtian principles that they cared passionately about. Early on the group turned down a CETA grant because they didn’t want to be bound by the restraints that government money might impose. The work they created, Your Obedient Servant, A. Lincoln, has endured now for 16 seasons. In its first few years the group included such theater innovators as playwright Beth Henley, director Robert Falls, composer Tim Schirmer (for many years the resident composer at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin), and actors Gary Cole (Steppenwolf, Remains) and Greg Vinkler (last seen as Shakespeare Repertory’s King John), as well as familiar Chicago theater people such as Dale Calandra (Center Theater), Jeff Ortmann (Wisdom Bridge), and Caroline Dodge Latta and her husband James (both teachers at Columbia College).
“It was a very intense time,” recalls Falls. “We all sat in these wooden cabins where we lived, and read every word that Lincoln wrote. We wanted to do something completely original and completely unusual. Yeah, it’s the story of Lincoln, but hipper. It’s a very Brechtian production, and we were really working with him in mind.”
“The process and product was much the way they put together The Civil War,” asserts Falls, referring to the recent highly acclaimed PBS special. “But we were doing that 15 or 16 years ago.”
Ahart continued to return each summer, and found new energy in 1981 when he married actress Rose Buckner, who’s now codirector of GAPS. They added two more original pieces to the regular season repertoire, forming a trilogy that spanned 160 years of American history from Lincoln’s birth to the moon walk. Later they added a piece for chamber orchestra and three narrators, which they performed at the old State Capitol in Springfield, as well as numerous one-person shows.
