Booth is Back and Baltimore’s Got Him!

By Janet Saros

Boyds, Maryland

Sunday, May 25, 2025

The stage awaits Booth to tell his version of history.

The world premiere of Matthew Weiner’s play--John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only! --opened for previews at Baltimore Center Stage (shown below) on May 15. The show comes with an impressive pedigree. Weiner is a nine-time Emmy winner and five-time WGA (Writers’ Guild of America) award winner. He is the creator of Mad Men and was the executive producer for The Sopranos. The man knows how to tell a story. This is his first crack at playwriting, however. The lead actor, Ben Ahlers (Booth), has a long list of credits on television and theater.

Weiner said in a recent Washington Post interview, “We spent too much time paying attention to our heroes and not enough time paying attention to our villains. We do not want to look at them, but they tell us a lot.”

The production is a somewhat complex play-within-a-play where Booth speaks directly to the audience, explaining that he wrote a play to explain himself and his actions to theatergoers. There are five other actors in the play, all of whom have multiple roles, which causes some confusion for the audience.

Booth’s play is basically his life story. He uses siblings Asia and Edwin to portray both themselves and their parents, Mary Ellen and Junius Brutus Booth. As most of us know, the elder Booth was a proclaimed Shakespearean actor, as was Edwin. Booth leads us to believe that falling short in comparisons to his father and brother stoked an insecurity and sense of victimhood and that the surrender of Lee to Grant and Lincoln’s call for voting rights for some Black men pushed him to his vile act that reverberates today.

There is a LOT going on in this production. Weiner spent ten years thinking about and researching Booth and the assassination. He throws many incidents in the life of Booth at the audience: Junius’s wife, Adelaide, and son in England that he abandoned before moving to America, rendering the ten children he had with Mary Ann illegitimate; the appearance of Adelaide in Maryland demanding money from Junius for her silence; Booth pretending to be a member of the Virginia militia to attend John Brown’s hanging in West Virginia; and Booth’s closeness to his mother and his promise to her not to enlist in the Confederate army.

There is also a protracted scene with the five other actors portraying Booth’s co-conspirators in the kidnapping-turned-assassination plot. I’m not sure the average theater patron would have the historical context to understand the nuances of that scene.

The staging and lighting help to put the audience in the action. The final scene of Booth and Herold in the Garrett barn as it’s set on fire is particularly well done.

Ahlers did a good job capturing Booth as a vain, insecure, manipulative white supremacist. There were some humorous parts, such as when there was an off-stage gunshot and Booth looked directly at the audience and said, “Not THAT gunshot.” 

The performance I attended was a preview, and the stated ninety minutes with no intermission ran closer to two hours. I expect it will be tightened up some before the official opening.

All in all, I’m glad I saw the play. I’ll be curious to read what the critics have to say.

Update: Center Stage has extended this production through June 22.

Photos by Janet Saros