Presenting the past

'Without further ado, I'd like to introduce the second president of the United States of America."

On cue, John Adams, in the person of actor Joe Doyle, makes his way with cane in hand to the lectern at the historic Grain House Restaurant in Basking Ridge, N.J.

As Adams might have felt at home in this candlelit dining room, in a building that dates back three decades before his 1797-1801 presidency, so Doyle is clearly comfortable in Adams' persona.

He says he understands "how men of the short persuasion" - Doyle, like the second president, is not excessively tall - "have a tendency, when confronted with big people, to speak rather forcefully so as not to be overlooked."

This recent evening marked the Grain House's 16th special historical dinner featuring an interpreter from Philadelphia's American Historical Theatre, founded in 1989 by William and Pamela Sommerfield.

Since then, the theater has been sending its actors and their hundreds of historical characters to all 50 states - and beyond - from its base in a Victorian row house on (appropriately enough) Mount Vernon Street in Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood.

Like the 15 previous programs at the Grain House, this one is distinguished by its painstaking accuracy, meticulous authenticity, and, most of all, the actor's deeply researched understanding of the person he is portraying.

"The characters are true to life," said Ann Corley, the restaurant's marketing director. "Our audience talks to them as though they're talking to the actual historical figures."

Tonight, the speaker is disarmingly self-deprecating ("For John Adams, it takes five minutes just to clear his throat") as he talks about his role in the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, his long, prickly relationship with fellow patriot and White House successor, Thomas Jefferson, and his love for his wife, Abigail. ("God may have created me, but Abigail Adams perfected me.")

The talk is peppered with wit and eloquence - "The concept of the nation is the concept of hope. . . . We don't need a king to tell us what to do because we are all kings in our castles" - and concludes to prolonged applause.

Doyle, in black breeches and a lace-cuffed white shirt, bears a striking resemblance to the Adams captured by portraitists of his time, which is not surprising, given the Sommerfields' commitment to authenticity.

"We try to be as accurate as we can possibly be," says Pamela Sommerfield. "For example, we examine all the portraits we can find in choosing actors to interpret our figures. And we are scrupulous about costuming."

The Sommerfields - he is from Wisconsin, she is British and describes them as "retirement age, but we're not retired" - came to their passion for American history through an earlier company, the Royal Pickwickians, which they launched in 1982 to perform Victorian-era music-hall material.

Soon they were receiving requests locally for portrayals of figures from Philadelphia history, so the company broadened its roster to encompass the likes of William Penn, Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross. By the end of the decade, their reputation had spread, and their interpreters were traveling farther afield and tackling characters from the whole of the nation's history.

In 1989, William Sommerfield was tapped by former Chief Justice Warren Burger to portray George Washington in a bicentennial re-enactment of the first president's ride from Mount Vernon to his inauguration in New York. It was a role Sommerfield would own, nationally and internationally, for decades, performing it hundreds of times a year - including numerous television appearances - until he retired and turned it over to another AHT actor, Dean Malissa.

Successes like that led the Royal Pickwickians in 1992 to officially become the nonprofit American Historical Theatre. Today, the current crew is about 40 part-time interpreters, generally recruited from other acting jobs; Doyle, for example, is a seasoned actor who runs a repertory company with his wife in Morrisville. They immerse themselves so deeply in their characters that they not only play out scripted appearances with elan, but also interact spontaneously with audience members during the subsequent Q&A period without ever breaking character.

Pamela Sommerfield notes that this kind of costumed fidelity to character was not always the rule. In the beginning, when she and her husband, five children in tow, played their deeply researched roles at regional museums, they were trailblazers.

"Especially in the early days, costumed characters weren't well-accepted in museums, where you were supposed to walk through the halls looking at cases of artifacts. We fought our way through that," she says, and today "the process of what we do has become acceptable."

Similarly, their early costumed work with the National Park Service was regarded as unorthodox and controversial. "Now, they're among our greatest fans," she says. "We have really been at the forefront of making [interpretation] respectable."

The AHT grew rapidly, the Sommerfields choosing and training ever more new actors as the list of characters expanded to include figures ranging from P.T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass and Charles A. Lindbergh to Sojourner Truth, Alice Paul and Eleanor Roosevelt. (William Barker, who for years has portrayed Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg, got his start with AHT.)

Over the years, the Sommerfields have also organized singular performances, including a White House commission last fall called "On Fire for Liberty," which was performed before French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

At the same time, AHT has maintained its commitment to education: "In our mission, it states that education is what we're here for," Pamela Sommerfield notes.

The theater not only dispatches historical characters to Philadelphia schools but, in the instance of Bache Martin, the K-8 public school on Brown Street near AHT's headquarters, it actually trains teachers and students to interpret figures for themselves.

"It's been nice to see them get interested in their characters," she says - "a park ranger worried about the fishing industry in the Delaware River, a captain of a boat that brought coal into the port of Philadelphia."

Additionally, "something that's popped up for us has been charter schools around the city. The main difference is that charter school audiences are smaller and, therefore, we can pretty much rely on a much more intimate program."

Asked about her hopes for the company a decade from now, she says, "I would like it to be a viable organization still. I would like [interpreters] to be able to avail themselves of whatever is new and good - new facilities like computers to research characters."

Then, taking a longer view of the historical figures - and the American past - that AHT portrays, she added, "I hope we'll have a tremendous urge to teach others about history, so we don't make the same mistakes we've made up to now."