shooting celebrities

The mythology of America, captured and contested.

Shooting Celebrities is a highly visual and physical exploration of America’s identity crisis: the authority possessed by a few to label the individual versus the power of the individual to define themself. Using the long lens of history, the piece pits Mary Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, against photographer Mathew Brady, America’s first celebrity photographer, in an almost irreverent contest over image, memory, and truth.

Brady’s camera, it was claimed, made all who sat before it famous. In Shooting Celebrities, a limited audience — seated in the round in Brady’s studio — encounters a cast of iconic Americans memorialized under the focus of his lens. Each figure offers a perspective on the American self, exposing how history is shaped as much by the image captured as by the life lived.

At the center is Mary Lincoln, battling expectation and grief while fighting to achieve, at last, an honest portrait of her true self. In defiance of the history that branded her the overdressed, unstable widow of America’s Greatest President, she insists on rewriting the narrative — challenging us to ask who controls the image of America, and who has the right to define it.

Artist Statement

With Shooting Celebrities, the american vicarious examines the mythology of America through the intersecting lenses of history, celebrity, and image-making. Lincoln’s America was a nation on the brink of collapse, yet also one being defined through the emerging medium of photography. Mathew Brady’s camera, it was said, “made all who sat before it famous.” But fame is not truth, and image is not identity.

Mary Lincoln embodies the gap between how America remembers and how individuals struggle to be seen. Cast as the overdressed, unstable widow of a martyred president, she has long been flattened by caricature. In Shooting Celebrities, we imagine her reclaiming her portrait — and with it, the right to define herself.

At its heart, the work asks who controls the American story: those who sit before the camera, or those who hold it. By staging this contest, we reflect on how myths of Lincoln, of celebrity, and of America itself are created, contested, and reimagined — then and now.

Press Quotes

• "the american vicarious has quickly earned a place on my list of must-see theatre companies!” – Broadway World

• "A feast for the eyes!" – Stage Buddy

• “A wildly off-beat, thought-provoking riff on the way we’re influenced to see history!” – Broadway World

• Mary Todd Lincoln: misunderstood First Lady, bereft mother, obsessive widow—and now, the unlikely subject of a trippy piece of experimental theatre!” – Stage Buddy