Post by Cliff Krainik on Mar 24, 2005 6:31:29 GMT -5
PART I
washingtonpost.com
Histrionics And History
Lincoln Library's High-Tech Exhibits Have Scholars Choosing Sides
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page C01
SPRINGFIELD, Ill.
The ghosts are working, but something's gone badly wrong with the battle scene.
It's crunch time at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, where gee-whiz theme-park technology is supposed to be meeting serious history. Three months before the museum's April opening, the team from BRC Imagination Arts -- a California-based purveyor of "innovative and immersive experience-based attractions" that's been hired to create and install all of the museum's content -- is rehearsing a theatrical presentation called "Ghosts of the Library."
Performed on a book-lined set that looks like an old-fashioned archive, the show employs a form of trademarked technical wizardry that BRC calls Holavision to create spectral figures from Lincoln's life and times. Shimmering and translucent, they share the stage with a live actor playing the host. The idea is for "Ghosts" to wow visitors with these otherworldly effects while simultaneously explaining why the study of the past is worthwhile.
"This library is filled with items that, well, they're almost like buried treasure," the host says. "Take this deed, for example." As he holds it up for examination, ghostly images of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln materialize nearby. The deed is for the grave site of their 4-year-old son, Eddie, "who died in the Lincolns' home just a few blocks from where you are sitting right now."
Early in the show, as the host reads from a soldier's diary, a smoky scene of Holavision combat streams from its pages. Later, as he clutches a copy of the Gettysburg Address, a ghostly quill inscribes the words on the air. Now, as the climax approaches, he dons a blue uniform coat and gestures toward a tattered Stars and Stripes framed on the wall behind him.
"You see that flag?" he says. "It's my favorite item from this collection: the regimental flag from the 33d Illinois. That flag was with us on June 22, 1863, when we were down in Mississippi at a town called Vicksburg."
The flag begins to wave. Martial choral music swells. Suddenly the whole back wall goes blank.
"Whoops," says one of the tech guys.
A computer has misfired, ruining the transition to a scene of dead Union soldiers sprawled by a split-rail fence. It's a small problem, easily fixed. Yet it seems to symbolize the high-stakes bet the Lincoln Museum has made on BRC's "experience-based" approach.
Museum officials say they're blending scholarship and showmanship on a scale never attempted before, without undermining the accuracy of the history they present. If they succeed, they contend, museums all over the world will imitate them. If they fail, they know -- because it's started to happen already -- they'll be savaged for Disneyfying the past.
Trial by Holavision, you might call it -- and the jury is still out.
"I'm going to do a quick reboot," the tech guy says.
'Maybe a Shotgun Marriage'
Rebooting -- or more precisely, reprogramming -- is exactly what BRC is trying to do to the traditional museum exhibit. There's a lot riding on this attempt, not just for the company and its Illinois client, but for historical sites like Mount Vernon, which has announced that it will expand and reshape its presentation of George Washington within the next couple of years, and for venerable museums like those at the Smithsonian Institution, which have concerns about attracting the next generation of visitors.
You could also argue -- as does the Lincoln Museum's director, Richard Norton Smith -- that in a democracy where young people's knowledge of history is shrinking, there is something even larger at stake. "In an era when it's easy to despair about historical illiteracy," Smith says, "this is an experiment attacking historical illiteracy."
The idea is to hook kids on Lincoln and send them home wanting to learn more.
Smith, a historian who has headed a number of presidential libraries, is a latecomer to this exhibit design process. He became director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in December 2003, five years after BRC started work on the museum. The library component -- which is across the street and which houses not only the state's 47,000 Lincoln-related documents and objects but also a broader Illinois history collection -- opened last October, and Smith doesn't want anyone to forget what a resource it is for scholars.
Still, he fully endorses the scholarship/showmanship mix.
"People have just got to stop thinking in terms of either/or," he says. What makes the new museum worth emulating is that "there really is a marriage -- maybe a shotgun marriage, but a marriage that I think is growing into a happy marriage" -- between the two.
Bob Rogers, BRC's founder and chairman, makes the same point with a Venn diagram. He draws two circles, labeled "scholarship" and "showmanship," on a sheet of yellow paper. The circles overlap, but only slightly. That tiny slice of shared space, he says, is where the museum needs to be.
Rogers is a cheerful, energetic man of 54 who wears khakis and black Rockports and has been accurately described as "a great talker." His company has created "experiences" for NASA, Knott's Berry Farm, the Texas State History Museum, world's fairs and corporations -- among them the Ford Rouge Factory Tour in Dearborn, Mich., designed to "emotionally engage visitors in the Ford Motor Company's culture, history, and brand." Last month, the company won a contract to upgrade the tourist experience at the Empire State Building.
BRC traces its lineage in a direct line from Walt Disney Imagineering, where Rogers worked before going out on his own in 1981. He's proud of his work for Disney, but doesn't go out of his way to mention it around scholars, preferring to emphasize the museum's need to tell a story. Once some people hear "the D word," he says, "they won't hear anything else."
His Disney connection, however, may have been a plus to the leadership of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which had been pushing for many years to build the top-notch library and museum Lincoln has never had. For one thing, the IHPA people needed to sell their project as a tourist attraction that could help hold visitors in Springfield overnight.
By 1998, after a long struggle for local, state and federal funds, they were finally in a position to hire an exhibit designer. They did this first, before hiring an architect, so that the visitor experience would have priority in the overall design. BRC was chosen over, among others, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the acclaimed firm behind the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The price was high: The combined library and museum project cost $115 million (not counting $35 million more for parking and a nearby visitor center), of which $90 million has gone to the museum, with roughly $54 million, according to Rogers, paid to BRC.
Rogers knew he had to get Lincoln scholars involved right away. With the help of Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz, who has been the chief historical consultant on every aspect of the project, BRC put together an advisory committee that included five academic historians, a number of state historians and, at BRC's request, three classroom teachers, one each from elementary, middle and high schools. Working with Rogers and BRC staffers, the committee set out to draw up guidelines for the museum's content.
The meetings were intense. The BRC people would toss out a creative idea, recalls middle school teacher Bill Ulmer, "and the historians would say: Wait a minute, you're getting too creative." But while BRC and the scholars may have started from radically different vantage points, Ulmer says, "I was amazed how they respected each other's opinions."
The academic historians agree, looking back, that the process was highly constructive. Another thing they mostly agree on is this:
They thought BRC's crazy idea for explaining the presidential campaign of 1860 really shouldn't be allowed to fly.
'A House Divided'
Cue the chirpy TV news music. Cue the pug-faced anchor. "The chaos of a four-way presidential race continues," Tim Russert intones, coming at you from a wall of video screens in a simulated network control room midway through "The Journey," the museum's main exhibit on Lincoln's life.
Whaaaaat?
"People will imagine that they've taken a very, very wrong turn," says Rogers, who's leading this particular tour. He doesn't sound the least bit worried by that.
"Campaign 1860" is only a small part of "The Journey," which dramatizes the Lincoln story from his log-cabin childhood to his White House triumphs and tragedy. (There are several smaller exhibits as well, among them a "Treasures Gallery" filled with conventionally displayed historic objects and "Mrs. Lincoln's Attic," a hands-on attraction for young children.) Still, the TV display has "show-stopper" written all over it.
continued ...
Cliff Krainik