Our American Cousin - The Lincoln Assassination

The Lincoln Assassination

The play's most famous performance was at Ford's Theatre in Washington City on April 14, 1865. Halfway through Act III, Scene 2, the character of Asa Trenchard, played that night by Harry Hawk, utters a line, considered one of the play's funniest, to Mrs. Mountchessington: "Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap."

During the laughter that followed this line, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer who was not in the cast of the play, fatally shot Abraham Lincoln. Familiar with the play, Booth chose this moment in the hope that the sound of the audience's laughter would mask the sound of his gunshot. He then leapt from Lincoln's box to the stage and made his escape through the back of the theater to a horse he had left waiting in the alley. The remainder of the play that night was suspended.

The 2008 American opera Our American Cousin presents a fictionalized version of the night of Lincoln's assassination from the point of view of the actors in the cast of the play of the same name.