Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Ringed with pillars, draped in U.S. flags, the presidential box dominates Ford’s Theatre which reopens this week in Washington, D.C. after an 18-month, $50 million renovation timed to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial.

Ford’s Theatre fell into disrepair immediately after Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth as he attended a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

President Barack Obama, who took his oath of office on Lincoln’s Bible, is expected to appear at a gala ceremony on Feb. 11, when the annual Lincoln Medal will be awarded to filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

Now the theater on 10th Street features a sleek new lobby, still smelling of paint. Carved out of an adjacent building, it provides room for the box office, a small concession stand, restrooms, an elevator, and a gift shop. A display case shows off a replica of the Brooks Brothers coat Lincoln wore the night he was shot.

Dating to 1861, the theater -- there are just 658 seats --is intimate and pleasantly modest, done up in cream and yellow colors that contrast with the red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left and is quite grandly proportioned. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

Endless Bloodshed

To celebrate the reopening, James Still was commissioned to write a play about Lincoln. Still, a native of Kansas, came up with “The Heavens Are Hung in Black,” the president’s invocation of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” in the face of endless bloodshed. The work depicts the president’s conflicts during the crucial five-month period before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

The challenge, said Still as he sat in a spiffed up dressing room backstage at Ford’s, was avoiding caricature, and finding Lincoln’s authentic voice. “He was a great writer. I read all of the speeches, I looked at the poetry of his language, the way he used syntax and humor.”

The family-friendly play starring David Selby opens with the president behind a brown desk in his sparsely furnished office. A half-finished Washington Monument is visible outside one of the windows.

War darkens the mood, even when young Tad Lincoln romps around the desk, bearing a soldier doll that he wants to hang for dereliction of duty. The president uses his power to pardon the doll, frustrating the boy.

Uncle Tom

As the play progresses, Lincoln engages friend and foe, tallying up the heavy costs of the Civil War, yet determined to stick it out to preserve the Union. In his dreams, he meets abolitionist John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. At the end, despite the political hazards, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.

Ford’s Theatre was doomed by the assassin’s bullet. After Lincoln was shot, no one knew what to do with the place. The government bought it from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to the slain president and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it had looked that night.

Now, Ford’s Theatre Society leases the site from the Park Service. Depending on when you take the tour, there may be a performance of a short play, or a talk by a park ranger, complete with hat. The company also produces a theatrical season. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Mortally Wounded

“I have a simple programming principle,” said the Theatre Society director Paul Tetreault. “I try to imagine what Lincoln would have enjoyed seeing.” This spring brings, somewhat amusingly, “The Civil War,” a musical.

The mortally wounded Lincoln was taken across the street to the Petersen House, where he died the next morning. It’s part of the National Historic Site, open to visitors.

“It was Good Friday, and people would have been shocked that Lincoln was in a theater, a place of such ill repute,” said Tetreault. As part of a larger plan to make 10th Street a Lincoln Campus, the building next to Petersen’s will become a new educational center.

When the Ford’s Theatre’s basement museum reopens in the spring, visitors can view Lincoln’s bloodstained pillow and the gun that fired the fatal shot. The bullet, however, is on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

“The Heavens Are Hung in Black” runs through March 8 at the Ford’s Theatre, 511 10th St. Tickets range from $16 to $52. Information: +1-202-347-4833; http://www.fordstheatre.org.

(Zinta Lundborg is a producer and writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Zinta Lundborg in New York at zlundborg@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 9, 2009 00:00 EST