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The Hoogland Center for the Arts is excited to present Mr. Lincoln by Herbert Mitgang in the Peggy Ryder Theatre on the Third Floor on April 25-27. The one-person play stars local performer John O’Connor as Abraham Lincoln. The play features both the folksy wisdom of Lincoln’s biography and the transcendent grandeur of his nation-healing words as president, healing that was cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

Relying heavily on Lincoln’s own words, Mr. Lincoln brings theater and history together in a powerful collision to examine the life and times of one of the more powerful, if perplexing, figures in American history.

Mitgang, a New York Times reporter, author, playwright and TV news producer, weaves an examination of the 16th president, warts and all. From his early adult life in the village of New Salem to his final days in the White House, Mr. Lincoln reveals his poverty, his self-education, his depression, his romance and stormy domestic life and the stoicism and wit with which he endured it. It all serves as a backdrop to Lincoln’s unwitting preparation for perhaps the most difficult and most important job ever presented to an American: Saving the Union when it was torn apart by the Civil War.

O’Connor, an Illinois political reporter for The Associated Press, is a native of Freeport, Illinois – site of the second of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 – and thus long a student of Lincoln. He has appeared in many theater productions during his 30 years in Springfield.