Laura in April by Derek Kannemeyer

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Laura in April: Pietà, Ford's Theatre, 1865
by Derek Kannemeyer

Laura Keene's company was staging Our American Cousin as her acquaintance John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box, shot Abraham Lincoln, and fled. It was Keene, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, who cradled the President's head in her lap as he lay dying. The bloodstained sleeve cuff of her costume is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
 
	~ adapted from Keene's Wikipedia entry; other sources, though, question the authenticity of both 
	the garment and the death scene legend, which they suggest began life as a publicity stunt 
	
Her birth name was Mary Moss. "Laura Keene"
was an invention. What choice had she but the stage?
The girls' father in penal Australia; his disgrace
branding them with its lash. What chance but in a new name,
and remarriage to the theater?  

A short bio. Two decades on the stage:
in London, NYC, San Francisco, Baltimore—founding her own theaters,
starring and managing—the great Laura Keene.

And the audiences came, and came:
New York, The Elves, a record 50 shows; London, The Colleen Bawn, 200. 
And in DC, transferred from the house that bore her name,
the Laura Keene, to the Ford's: Our American Cousin.

To which a President came: to see the famed Laura Keene.
When Wilkes Booth's gunshot stopped the show, 
and the blood-soaked theater
of an epoch called her into its wings, she flew offstage
after the followspot, through a milling and hollering crowd,

to take her mark. A scene so tender, in so theatrical a frame,
the scale of it still tips. She kneels; she acts, haloed or human, 
to cradle a martyred man; she weeps, in Laura's or in Mary's name.

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