Fox in the Footlights

Against the backdrop of New York City during the Civil War, Wallack's Theater, one of three premier theater families in the toddling United States, uses modern improvements in lighting technology to change the way theater is done, creating a visceral connection between stage and audience and opening those experiences to the middle classes. Kit Drake arrives at his Great Aunt's, a Grande Dame of the theater, and finds himself enfolded into her world of passionate illusion, political espionage, and social consciousness supported by the infamous Bohemian "Bees". Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Cushman, and Edwin Booth were all members. Growing from a boy who feels invisible to a young hero at the center of national and social progress, Kit discovers himself as part of a family legacy that dates back to his ancestor, Sir Francis, in the seventeenth century and an agreement made between Queen Elizabeth's favorite privateer and the fey, an agreement that has influenced human history for hundreds of years and continues to in the effort to keep the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, alive, at the helm of the United States, and return the young country to its original promise of a democracy that includes the banishment of slavery from the North American Continent and equality for all races, religions, and social classes.