Donna Daniels hopes to share her knowledge of history with the residents of her former hometown when she appears Sunday in one-person play she wrote about Mary Todd Lincoln.
“It’s kind of a kick for me to be invited back to Batavia to do this play,” said Daniels, a 1971 graduate of Batavia High School now living in Wheaton. “Many people may not know this, but one of Batavia’s claims to fame is that this is where Mrs. Lincoln stayed for a brief time when she was declared insane.”
Daniels’ play, “MTL: The Last Years of Mary Todd Lincoln”, focuses on the former first lady’s travails in the 17 years after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Daniels’ performance, at the 6th annual Lincoln Dinner sponsored by the Batavia Heritage Committee, is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Lincoln Inn restaurant and banquet facility on Illinois Highway 31 in Batavia. Tickets are $15 and are available at the door or in advance by calling 879-8441 or 406-1138.
“It’s excellent,” retired Rev. Lee Moorehead, a Heritage Committee member, said of Daniels’ play, which he saw four years ago.
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Daniels, a 39-year-old receptionist for a Wheaton law firm, performs the role of Mary Todd Lincoln about 200 times a year for schools and community groups with her husband, Max Daniels, who plays Abraham Lincoln.
They wrote a play together about five year ago titled “An Evening with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln.” And they participate in about a half-dozen Civil War re-enactments during the year.
To research their roles, they have collected about 600 books on the Lincolns, which are in a spare-bedroom-turned-library in their home. Few of the volumes are dedicated solely to Mrs. Lincoln, she said.
The thing Batavians might find most interesting in Daniels’ show is her portrayal of Mrs. Lincoln’s four-month stay at a sanitarium at Illinois 31 and Union Street, which is now an apartment building.
The insanity proceedings were started against her by her only surviving son about 10 years after the assassination and closely following the death of the Lincolns’ third child.