“I knew the cards were stacked and the odds were against me.

No, I couldn’t afford to tell the truth.”

American Theatre:

“She kept the nest that hatched the plot.” With that statement, newly inducted U.S. President Andrew Johnson sealed the fate of Mary Surratt, the first woman to be hanged in America. The long-forgotten Maryland boarding house owner was convicted of conspiracy in the Lincoln assassination affair, and her story has been rescued from obscurity in a new work by the Manhattan multimedia performance company Time & Space Limited.

Director Linda Mussmann, who frequently draws on history for her collage-like performance works, confesses to taking “a certain creative liberty” with events that really happened. “History and fiction can lie together with something new to say,” she suggests, espousing her creed.

The historical Mary Surratt is embodied by company member Claudia Bruce in a simple, and stark solo performance. Movement, words, film, and music — by TSL music director Semih Firincioğlu — powerfully and, sometimes, humorously convey the story of a vibrant Southern woman who Mussmann proposes was railroaded to her death sentence.

Rebecca Schneider, High Performance:

“If Firincioğlu weren’t sitting on the stage at a grand piano and if Mussmann weren’t visible in her home-made lighting booth in the center of the audience, Mary would be Bruce’s one-woman show. But the three artists combined to make an apparently straight forward set of facts into a strange vaudevillian funhouse. Disorientation made itself felt in Bruce’s gestures - sometimes overtly theatrical, slow and large, sometimes speedy as a wind-up doll. Firincioglu played now familiar, now strange pieces of tunes, swinging in and out of connection with the text. And Mussmann erratically raised and dimmed the lights or ran a film projector that flashed barren trees and snowy fields against the slatted flats, underlining her premise that even in “straightforward” narrative, meaning is a coincidence of habits of perception.”

Claudia Bruce, speaking to Amherst Bulletin:

“Performing Mary Surratt is such a growing process for me. And there are a million things to learn, especially about the Civil War — it’s such a quagmire — and about how we in this country are still influenced by those four years and what it did to the psyche of America. Why it was really fought, and how it’s been distorted; it was complicated and complex. And doing this piece you realize a lot of things about women, and what it was like to be a woman then.”