'Benjamin Harrison Chased a Goat' lifts biography of the only Hoosier president

 Arts for Lawrence has staged an unfortunately delayed world premiere with "Benjamin Harrison

Stenographer Alice Sanger and President Harrison confer.

Chased a Goat," a play commissioned from Hank Greene. It ends a short run over the weekend at its theater at 8920 Otis Avenue, at the former fort named for the title character.

The 23rd president of the United States moved to prominence in a period of national adjustment following the Civil War, with the emergent Republican Party riven by success as well as challenged by the broad-based Democratic Party. 

"Benjamin Harrison Chased a Goat" exemplifies Ralph Waldo Emerson's confident, controversial prediction that biography was destined to replace history as a way to understand America. It is directed  by Christine Kruze with a firm resolve to highlight vividly how distinctive individuals shape history.

When the first scene focuses on the figure of Caroline Harrison, the president's strongly assertive wife, the audience is being prepared for reminders that the underdogs in life have only their memories to tell their stories, because those experiences will not rise to the top of the dominant historical narrative. Played with authority by Carrie Ann Schlatter, Mrs. Harrison returns in oratorical form several times. Near the end of the play, we learn how hugely influential she was upon her husband. Benjamin Harrison is depicted as practically a visionary, an upright man effectively done in by his party's machinations.

I won't pretend to set my knowledge of the history behind the Harrison story next to the playwright's. He seems comfortable going into the weeds of the forces that both elevated Harrison and left him isolated for one term at the top. Those years (1889-1893) inserted a Republican between the two terms of the Democrat Grover Cleveland — the only instance of an interrupted two-term presidency.

Harrison is shown as an amiable man stirred to action both by his family history (grandfather William Henry Harrison had preceded him in office, serving just one month before dying of pneumonia) and his effectiveness as an orator. The Electoral College, nowadays revived outside of civics classes as the key player in presidential elections, put Benjamin over the top in 1888. Political precariousness was his lot, and perhaps the wandering goat he had placed whimsically on the White House lawn functions in this play as a kind of symbol of that. 

Republican manipulativeness is represented here by Edward Proctor, who openly strides into a liaison position from the party to the presidency. He is played by Joshua Ramsey, sturdily voiced and ramrod-straight in posture. In the background are the circumstances that moved Harrison into the Oval Office. As stated by John Bartlow Martin in his lively "Indiana: An Interpretation," here they are as set in  the campaign of 1888: "Though the Republicans controlled Indianapolis, they provably never had a plurality of the white votes. They won by voting bought or deluded Negroes, floaters and dead men." 

It's proper to Greene's mission that not all of these circumstances can be detailed in the play; it is loaded enough with political talk of an intricacy that is managed pretty well through dialogue. All the characters speak with flashes of wit and the kind of stylized thoroughness that might remind playgoers of George Bernard Shaw.

Despite the prominence of Proctor and Harrison loyalist James Noble, passionately interpreted by Allex Oberheide, "Benjamin Harrison Chased a Goat" rests on the ambitions and intelligence of two women, presented over a range of years from Harrison's courtship of Caroline through the very end of his term, when the second woman almost takes over the action.

She is a pioneering White House staffer, Alice Sanger, whose job title as junior stenographer only hints at the skills she brings to a job close to the President in 1893. Both she and the Chief Executive are confused about her proper role at first, but she ends up shaping and rounding off his farewell speech. In Morgan Morton's portrayal, Sanger seems kind of a flibbertigibbet at first, scattered in speech and focus as a young woman well aware that young women in the 19th century were not expected to make any kind of impression on the workaday male world, particularly at the highest levels. These all-too-hidden strengths are clearly intended to contrast her with Caroline Harrison, self-assured and restive about the secondary roles assigned her and all of her sex in the 19th century.

Sanger turns out to have an advanced sense of social justice that puts some of the views she advances as suggestions for the President on the progressive side of how we look at things today. I will not question the possibility of these views among influential women in an era when several of them earned respectable niches in the American story. My eyebrows shot up a bit when she deplored the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, which occurred on Harrison's watch, and used the phrase  "Native Americans" to refer to the victims at a time when the only neutral usage was "Indians." I can't imagine how that might have gone down with a man whose grandfather rose in national esteem as an "Indian fighter" right here in Indiana.

Structurally, in fact, the whole play is weighted too heavily toward the end on revelations as to Sanger's improbable rise and the back story she brings to the action, including the central role of the First Lady. Playwrights who rework history are probably aware of the difficulty of front-loading the exposition, so that historical drama gets perceived as "educational." And suspense is vital in staged stories, so it's understandable that so much about Alice Sanger rests on how the drama is resolved, and much of Caroline Harrison's role in the stenographer's rise gets a touching, posthumous seal placed upon it. This ties up all the knots in a story of underlying complexity. Greene's way of doing so is handled creditably, and this production seems whole-hearted in making vivid the character of the only Hoosier president and some of the people around him.