A one-woman play about Abigail Adams is being presented at Theatre at the Center in Munster, with actress and historian Leslie Goddard portraying the second first lady across eight performances running Sept. 16 through Sunday, Sept. 20. The show, titled “Abigail Adams: First Lady of Firsts,” casts Adams as an early political influencer who pushed for fairness and equality even before she ever set foot in the White House.
Adapted and performed by Goddard, the 90-minute production with one intermission is built almost entirely from Abigail Adams’s own words, according to thelansingjournal.org. Goddard has said the script came together easily because so much of Adams’s correspondence to her husband and others has been wonderfully preserved and published. That trove is enormous: John and Abigail Adams corresponded in nearly 1,200 extant letters between 1762 and 1801, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Setting the Scene Inside an Unfinished President's House
The production imagines Adams as the first first lady to live in the newly built White House, and the Theatre at the Center stage has been transformed into the partially completed main entrance foyer of the President’s House, according to panoramanow.com. The staging draws on the building’s unfinished condition when the Adamses arrived in November 1800, while also reflecting the practical effort required to make the residence usable.
The play also recounts Abigail Adams’s famous appeal to her husband to “remember the ladies” as the new nation took shape, the report notes. That plea for women’s standing under new laws is central to how the show frames Adams as a political influencer well before she reached the White House.
What the records show about the unfinished residence
According to the White House Historical Association, John and Abigail Adams moved into the unfinished but habitable President’s House on Nov. 1, 1800, making six rooms comfortable and preparing others for official entertaining. The National Park Service notes that much of the building’s interior remained incomplete and that Abigail Adams used the unfinished East Room to dry the family wash.
A Tea Blend Born of Protest
Years before her time as second lady, Adams joined the wives of other prominent leaders in refusing to serve English tea after heavy taxation contributed to the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Rather than go without, she blended sassafras root with dried strawberry leaves and a hint of sage and called the concoction LIBER-Tea, according to the Lansing Journal. NWITimes reports that Goddard is performing the show at Theatre at the Center this month, while the Chicago Tribune says audiences have been served complimentary cups and saucers of Abigail’s tea blend.
The Tribune account, written by columnist Philip Potempa, also describes a themed dinner created by Hugo Perea, who with Maria Arteaga owns 10Forty Banquets and Catering at the Center for Visual and Performing Arts. The meal was inspired by White House menus of the era and included White House garden vegetable soup, roasted chicken and dressing with creamy supreme sauce, homestyle mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and Abigail’s apple pan dowdy baked in a cast iron pan and served à la mode. Molasses — taxed under the British Parliament’s 1733 Molasses Act, which also imposed shipment restrictions on sugar and molasses imported from the West Indies — was important in colonial New England, the Tribune reports.
Contrasts With Martha Washington and the Founding Families
Goddard has drawn contrasts between Abigail Adams and Martha Washington in describing the play’s backdrop, per the Tribune. She has said Martha Washington ordered her staff to burn her personal correspondence, notes and letters with George Washington to protect the privacy of their 41-year marriage — a stark difference from John Adams, whose correspondence has been preserved. Goddard has also noted that Abigail Adams was sometimes referred to as “Mrs. President.”
The Tribune account also notes that Abigail Adams was the mother of John Quincy Adams, who went on to become the sixth U.S. president, and that John Adams outlived his wife. Goddard, who has appeared on Potempa’s weekly radio show on WJOB 1230 AM in Hammond, has previously brought Julia Child, Amelia Earhart and Titanic survivor Violet Jessop to the same Munster stage in one-woman shows staged in September 2023, July 2024 and March 2025, respectively, according to the Lansing Journal.
