WASHINGTON -- Who knew that Ford's Theatre, where President Lincoln was shot by an assassin/actor, is still a working theater? Certainly not me. I didn't even know it still was standing.

It's not one of the big attractions in Washington. It's no Air and Space Museum or Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. But it's one of those little jewels of living history that encourage the imagination, bringing to life the death of a great president. Was that a movement in the box? Could it be the spirit of John Wilkes Booth preparing to jump on the stage below after shooting Lincoln?

The theater and the home across the street where Lincoln died are both open to the public (and free), and the basement of the theater houses a small Lincoln museum showcasing such grim memorabilia as the coat he was wearing when he was shot, the derringer used and Booth's diary, in which he explained his plan to kill the man who freed the slaves.

Ford's Theatre was closed after Lincoln's death because an outraged public didn't want the murder site used for entertainment. The building was used for business but reopened as a theater in 1968 after the historical value came to outweigh the concern that it wouldn't be respectful to put on shows there.

Lincoln enjoyed theater as an escape from his day job and had gone to see a comedy with his wife and another couple on April 14, 1865. It was about 10:15 p.m. when Booth entered the presidential box to the right of the stage just as the audience was laughing at a line in "Our American Cousin." He shot the president, stabbed Maj. Henry Rathbone and chose as his route of escape to leap onto the stage below, a flamboyant move sure to bring more drama to his act. However, he got entangled with the flags and decorations that marked this as a presidential box. Booth broke a bone in his left leg when he landed on the stage but still fled to his horse waiting in the alley.

Lincoln was taken to the house across the street, where he died the next morning. You can see the sitting room where Mary Todd Lincoln and son Robert waited through the night. The bed in the back room of this modest boarding house owned by a tailor is not the actual bed Lincoln died in -- that bed is now owned by the Chicago Historical Society -- but you can envision the lanky Lincoln stretched diagonally across the bed, his hand held by the 23-year-old doctor first to respond to "Is there a doctor in the house?"

Booth, a Southern sympathizer, was captured and killed April 26 in a Virginia farmhouse. I had forgotten he had six co-conspirators, including Mary Surratt, a woman who ran a boarding house where the murder was plotted.

On my visit to the capital, I trudged to Ford's Theatre through a snowstorm, much like a 19th-century heroine (but with better boots) clutching not a baby, but a ticket to August Wilson's play "Jitney." From where I sat, there was a clear view of the presidential box, with its faded flags draped across the front. Honestly, at one time out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement.

A strong sense of the presence of a man who had fought for civil rights commingled with the play about blacks in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, men struggling to provide for their families and provide transportation for their poor neighborhood.

The play hammered home the slow progress of equality in the United States. Seeing "Jitney" at Ford's Theatre, in a city where multicultural is no misnomer, where my cabbies came from India, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Haiti, made it as relevant today as it was 30 years ago and made the death of a man a century and a half ago seem even more tragic.

When Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, "Now he belongs to the ages." His massive memorial on the National Mall in Washington brings that message home, but so does a more intimate and human visit to Ford's Theatre.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.