PEMBERVILLE - Abraham Lincoln should feel right at home in the Pemberville Opera House.
At least, that is the Abraham Lincoln who along with Harriet Beecher Stowe will come to visit the opera house in the persons of actors Michael and Jacqueline Hurwitz.
The Columbus-area couple will present "An Evening with Legends" Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the opera house. Tickets are $10.
Michael Hurwitz is writer as well as a thespian. His latest book, "Backstage with Booth" is on Edmund Spangler, a stagehand who was working the night Lincoln was assassinated.
His current project is on historic opera houses in Ohio, including the Pemberville Opera House.
The Hurwitzes visited the opera house last year, and at that time Jacqueline Hurwitz commented that it would the right stage to bring Stowe and Lincoln to life. "It's a wonderful mixing of atmosphere and character," she said.
The performance, Michael Hurwitz said, is not just a re-enactment. "We try to create a historical likeness of the individual."
That means extensive research into customs and hairstyles, close attention to make up.
Michael Hurwitz owns copies of the two "life masks" made of Lincoln, and has used them as the models for the prosthetics for his character.

He strives to portray Lincoln in a way that transcends people's image of "the icon on Mount Rushmore, on the penny."
"He was an unbelievably fascinating human being," Hurwitz said. His extensive research helps him flesh out that character on stage. "I think people who are not really attuned to Lincoln will walk away saying: 'I didn't know that.'"
For example, after the death of his third son Willie, Lincoln had the body exhumed twice so he could look again at the boy's body. That behavior is at once "macabre" but also "a very sad statement about the man." And because Lincoln was afraid something would happen to his youngest son Tad, Lincoln refused to send the boy to school. So the boy couldn't care for himself until he was 8 and was illiterate at age 12.
Jacqueline Hurwitz faces a different challenge. All most people know about Stowe is that she wrote the anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
What surprised the actress, who did the research for the script while a student at Ohio Dominican University in 1982, was how much of the classic novel was actually drawn from Stowe's own life.
"It was truly a work of passion," Jacqueline Hurwitz said. Stowe always said that "God guided my hand" when writing the book.
But there's more to Stowe. She was an advocate for women's rights and because of one of her son's she wrote a book that contended that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral failing, a new concept at the time.
She led in many ways a tragic life. A daughter was addicted to morphine, another son died at birth.
"She dealt with a lot of personal tragedy."
"She saw herself first and foremost as a wife and mother," the actress said.
For Jacquelin Hurwitz the key to capturing her character and making sure she's true to the time period is getting a feel for the speech patterns of the period.
"Somehow you get the flavor of how they talk and just expand it," she said. Over time, she came "to feel very comfortable in her skin."
For Jacqueline Hurwitz this is a return for the character. In the 1980s, she and her husband had a performance that featured Stowe with his portrayals of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Once that show ran its course - she went to school to become a teacher and now works as a special needs teacher - he continued to perform Mark Twain.
Returning to her role as Stowe is like "meeting an old friend." She's looking forward to reviving her portrayal in the comfortable confines of the Pemberville Opera House.
Michael Hurwitz said the work of Carol Bailey and the Pemberville Historical Society to use the opera house again as a performance venue is "exciting."
"They're bringing it back as a community center" just as it was in its heyday. Pemberville is "way ahead of the curve ... in making this an important component of the community.
The space will only enhance the performance. "It just wraps history around you," he said. "It engulfs the entire presentation."