"Apart From That…," an ambitious production staged last month by the Manhattan Youth Players at I.S. 89, first took shape as a question in the mind of director Theseus Roche. "I wonder what the actors were thinking when Lincoln was assassinated?" he asked himself as he watched a Pinter play at Lincoln Center.

		Roche, 32, decided to incorporate the script of "Our American Cousin," the comedy-melodrama that President Lincoln was watching when he was killed, into his own play about that fateful evening in 1865. Then he put the play in the hands of his 20 young thespians. In four two-hour performances, the middle-schoolers deftly navigated scene changes and period costumes (by Christine Darch), and delivered heaps of dialogue without slouching, stepping on a hem, or dropping a line. Even the English and frontier American accents were carried off with aplomb. A chorus and talented soloists sang ballads about the perils of alcohol, frontier living and war, backed by the guitar of musical director Colin McGrath. The stock comic characters included pampered gentry, snake-in-the-grass villain, drunken servant, stuffy butler, foolish fop and virtuous milkmaid. Guido Girgenti played the American cousin, Asa Trenchard, an easy-going

Vermonter who mangles the English language with varmint-laced idioms ("…squirm like an eel on a mud bank.") and overwrought verbs ("absquatulate"), while saving the day. All the while, one could not forget that the evening's tragic climax lay ahead. Lincoln (played by Roche) and Mrs. Lincoln (Eve Kaplan) were at stage left, watching the performance from their flag-festooned box. Tension mounts as John Wilkes Booth (Stetson Miller) approaches the president. The instant before he shoots, actors freeze and Lincoln steps center stage to deliver an emotionally charged soliloquy followed by the sound of a shot and Booth's dash across the stage. Roche said he chose the play to honor great civil rights figures and to serve as a parallel to more recent events that shocked the nation, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the attacks on Sept. 11.

The director, who has worked with many of the actors before, called the endeavor his "purest theatrical experience." In a surprise finale to the last performance, the cast presented a short play they had created for and about Roche as part of a class project. Switching to their own clothes and manners, they demonstrated their esteem for their mentor.

"If I ever want my son to be a hero," said actress Zoe Mylonas, "I know what name to call him."