When the curtain rises on the world premiere at Baltimore Center Stage, an actor portraying the Harford County native and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth spreads his coattails, sits down on a fringed stool, hunches over a baby grand piano and begins plinking out a tune.

Then the man who fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln steps away from the keyboard — and the piano continues playing by itself. Perhaps not coincidentally, the melody is composer Franz Liszt’s demon-inspired “Mephisto Waltz No. 1.” Booth waves his hand impatiently, and the music abruptly stops.

It’s the audience’s first clue that something isn’t quite right. It seems that we have ventured into a new realm and are about to be introduced to a version of reality quite different from our own.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Confederate States of America.

“John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!” represents the live theater debut of another Harford County native, Matthew Weiner, who is best known for eviscerating 1960s American culture in his hit period drama, “Mad Men.”

Although Weiner sets his shows in the past, his gaze is always firmly fixed on the present, which is what makes his work compelling.

His newest effort — an ambitious, deeply serious, imperfect and quite possibly Broadway-bound play — leaps back 160 years to Maryland just after the Civil War and explores a very different American fault line. The playwright sets out to answer the question of how the United States became the polarized nation it is today, a nation in which half of the population is deeply suspicious of and at times hostile to the other half.

Booth apparently believed that killing Lincoln would reignite the Confederacy and result in the ultimate defeat of the Union forces. Weiner’s play asks what America would have been like if he had succeeded.

Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, the show opens on a nation stretching from Georgia to Texas that flies a rebel flag instead of the Stars and Stripes, a nation where Booth is hailed as a founding father and his portrait is embossed on the $1 coin.

He agrees to take the stage for a single performance to explain what drove him at age 26 to murder Lincoln. (That’s the “one night only” referenced in the title. The production actually runs through June 22.)

An uncanny similarity

Part of the answer is biographical, and the play delves into Booth’s complicated relationship with two men he feared would overshadow him: his volatile father, Junius, and talented older brother, Edwin, who were acclaimed by critics as the finest American actors of their respective generations.

But in addition to the family psychodrama, audiences will likely notice an uncanny similarity between the issues dominating political discourse in 1865 and those making headlines today.

It’s difficult not to see parallels between Proud Boys who led the Jan. 6 riots and and the Know Nothing Party, of which Booth was a member; both used anti-immigrant rhetoric and advocated for deporting criminals.

Some audience members might be struck by the similarities between methods used by our 16th and 47th presidents — even if Lincoln’s and Donald Trump’s goals were diametrically opposed.

“His hand should have burned on that Bible when he swore to uphold the Constitution,” Booth tells the audience and then begins to tick off Lincoln’s abuses of power:

“Arrest of civilians and their trial by military tribunal. Censorship of newspapers and speech — even the singing of songs. Suspension of habeas corpus, granting absolute power of arrest, trial and even execution without charge.”

It’s not surprising that a project this prestigious would attract high-profile actors. Ben Ahlers of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” portrays Booth, while Adrienne C. Moore, memorable as Black Cindy in Netflix’s standout series, “Orange is the New Black,” skillfully depicts several characters from an uncannily clairvoyant fortune-teller to a wronged and vengeful wife.

Ahlers’ portrayal of Booth is all cockiness and charm with a dimple in his chin and a twinkle in his eye. But I wish Ahlers had conveyed more of Booth’s aggrieved paranoia, his sense of being a victim, his barely suppressed rage. If the character had frightened or shocked us even once, we might have asked ourselves why we succumbed so readily to his charisma.

Another cast standout: Ked Merwin takes a relatively minor role (He’s known only as “The Prompter.”) and fills in the blanks until he has turned a stock figure into a real human being — a befuddled young man beginning to grow into his potential.

The only not-quite-right note in the cast is the actor portraying Edwin Booth, the assassin’s thespian brother and lifelong rival.

Robbie Tann, a fine performer in the wrong role, appears on stage in Shakespearean attire fashioned by costume designer Orla Long. Not only is the garb a nod to Edwin’s profession — his portrayal of Hamlet was renowned — it looks faintly ridiculous, perhaps signaling that the character is intended partly as a comic foil to the murderous John Wilkes.

The real Edwin Booth might have been quiet, reserved and intellectual, but he almost surely exerted a force of personality equal to that of his younger brother. This was a man who knew how to stake his claim to the footlights, how to compel an audience’s attention — something the diffident Tann never quite achieves.

A contrived voice

Another problem is Weiner’s decision to write the dialogue in a style that is intentionally florid. Characters at times lapse puzzlingly into an inverted sentence structure more reminiscent of Yoda from the “Star Wars” franchise than of 19th century English novels.

For example, a man confronting a crisis remarks, “We embarked starry-eyed to this new world, and navigated poorly have I.”

Or this: “Father was finally most undone, the truth astride him with hunger, like an eagle to his gut.”

As “Mad Men” fans can attest, Weiner knows how to write natural-sounding dialogue that packs an emotional wallop. His script for this play contains some marvelous lines. The Booth family, for instance, after leaving Europe settles in Baltimore because “although it was nowhere, it was midway to everywhere.”

So it’s perplexing that he settled on a narrative voice so deliberately contrived, a voice that, by encouraging viewers to adopt an attitude of detached irony, imposes a barrier between the actors and audience that it’s difficult to surmount.

And that’s a shame because what Weiner has to say is so smart, so relevant to the world we live in today, so very nearly essential.

The more time you spend with this play, the more the line between fantasy and real life begins to blur. A scenario that was clearly fictitious when the curtain rose — that we are living in the Confederate States of America — begins to seem much less like make-believe once the performers have taken their final bows.

When Booth shot Lincoln, maybe he did really reinvigorate the Confederacy. Maybe he was the founding father of a nation whose legacy lives on today, in headlines about immigration and the U.S. Constitution and due process.

Robert E. Lee might have surrendered in at Appomattox in 1865. But, what made us think the war was over?

We’re fighting it now.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-332-6704.