Amid Glitz Will Be a Piece of Americana

James Whitmore’s tone was familiar but firm as he spoke about his upcoming performance Monday night at the opening of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

It was a tone that seemed right for the words of Abraham Lincoln, some of which the actor will recite when he presents Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” at the Center’s inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Copland composed “Lincoln Portrait” in 1942, weaving together broad, brassy chords and folk melodies with quotes from Lincoln’s letters and speeches. The work, with oratory sparked by a war that split a nation, was written during one that divided the world.

“The country was in deep trouble when Copland wrote it, in the middle of the Second World War,” Whitmore said by phone from Toronto, where he is working on a television production. “But it is remarkably unbellicose. It is a very peaceful piece of music.”

Whitmore typically seeks a clear historical sense of a work that he will perform.

The actor, who turns 65 Wednesday, has played Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman, Will Rogers and Walt Whitman. Most of the performances won praise for their realism and dramatic quality.

He was lauded for his role in “Inquest,” Daniel Freed’s 1970 play about the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Even in the movies, as a character uniformed for one war or another, he is proof of the presidential warning that he will quote Monday: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”

Recently, he saw contemporary significance in the social consciousness that gives the “Lincoln Portrait” its impact. He had just narrated the work at the Liberty Weekend celebration in New York and was returning in a limousine with his family to Manhattan when they hit a traffic jam on a highway. Pulling onto surface streets, the car traveled through a ghetto in Newark, N.J. Whitmore was the only passenger awake.

“After saying the words of Lincoln, I was looking at Newark and it seemed to me that the promise of America must be fulfilled there now. . . . I was tempted to wake everybody up after the fireworks and feeling so self-congratulatory, but I didn’t.”

His career often takes him on roads less traveled. The road of the itinerant stage performer is not as familiar to many movie actors as it is to Whitmore. In the past two years, he said, he has appeared in 10 plays that, combined, have taken him to about 30 cities in the United States and Canada.

There was “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in Alberta, Canada, then a contemporary play in West Palm Beach. He made a five-city East Coast tour in a play about nuclear war, returned to Alberta for “Death of a Salesman,” and was in Toronto taping Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” for PBS.

In looks and acting style, he has been compared to Spencer Tracy. With curly hair and stocky build, he stands 5 feet, 9 inches tall, six inches shorter than Lincoln as described in the Copland portrait.

But with narration, he said, “You’re not taking the form of the man. You try to blend, to make the narration stand out and away and above the music and yet blend.”

The chance to narrate the Copland piece has not drawn only actors. Adlai Stevenson and Carl Sandburg are among those who have done it, along with Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda.

Whitmore, who is divorced, said stage acting, as opposed to film, “is the most exhilarating thing a person can do. I enjoy it more, much more . . . only I do know I don’t have enough time for my 12 grandchildren.”

He keeps a home in Malibu and works frequently in television. He is now narrating a PBS series on the history of the American West through the eyes of artists. In November, Whitmore will begin work on “Nuts,” a movie based on a stage play about a woman charged with murder. Whitmore plays the judge at her trial. It is his first movie since “The First Deadly Sin” in 1980.

Meanwhile, he will fly to Los Angeles on Monday morning and head straight to Orange County and the Center, where the opening night program also is set to include soprano Leontyne Price singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” a new commissioned work by Los Angeles composer William Kraft, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But before Beethoven’s monumental work, which concludes the concert, Whitmore will speak the simple but powerful words of Lincoln.

And when it’s all over, he’ll head home for a brief rest before going back on the road.