Booth's Richard

The Hidden Room, Eric Colleary from the Harry Ransom Center, and the Austin Scottish Rite Theatre lead a team of award-winning actors, scholars, and designers to resuscitate the ghost of John Wilkes Booth’s infamous production by way of his own personal promptbook, painstaking research into playing practices of the day, appropriate costumes, props, set, and music, all in the period-perfect and glorious Austin Scottish Rite Theater, built in 1871.

Explore lost theatre practices of the Civil-War era, glimpse into the mixing of 1860’s theatre and politics, and consider how rhetoric and fear turned a country against itself. The promptbook, darkly fascinating, is an unintentional gift – a magic mirror back into to a theatre in 1861, that a radicalized madman left behind.