The young, pre-Presidential Lincoln in Intiman's production of the play by Robert E. Sherwood, is young, dumb, and full of glum. He's unambitious, nervous around the ladies, sure he'll never come to any good, and morbid in his thinking. (Not how one imagines Sherwood, who was six feet eight, a film critic for Vanity Fair, and a member of the Algonquin Round Table.)

But he's also a tough guy—handy with a gun, an axe, and unafraid to finish a fight another man has started. It's not the bookish, sagacious Lincoln buffed up and trotted around by the Obama campaign. But it was one of his reputations.

Erik Lochtefeld (one of the few out-of-town actors in the production) plays Lincoln as a mix of folksy, wide-eyed credulity punctuated with moments of surprising shrewdness. That was how his detractors described him, and Lochtefeld sometimes tips the scales toward the cartoonish vision of "Lincoln the rail-splitter."

But perhaps after Lincoln's co-optation by the Obama campaign, we need reminding that Abe was a tough guy, a rural sumbitch who worked as a soldier, barkeep, and railroad worker. The Obama image-makers, for a variety of smart political and social reasons, emphasized Lincoln the Dignified Leader and obscured Lincoln the Brawny Beefcake. But the popular image of Lincoln used to be more butch, closer to Carl Sandburg's The Prairie Years and Norman Rockwell's 1965 portrait [above]. This Lincoln has a book in hand, but he's out in the woods with his hand-hewn cabin behind him, carrying a big ax for manful smashing and a plumb bob for stoic equilibrium.

Lincoln used to be a dude. And Intiman's production—a little sprawling, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes goofy—reminds us that some dudes have greatness thrust upon them. recommended