Casey Wimpee’s The Brutes explores 19th-century America’s most renowned theatrical dynasty, the Booths, less than six months before the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Based on a remarkable true event, the play centers on November 25, 1864, when brothers Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth shared a stage for the first and only time at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre. Rehearsing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar over Thanksgiving week, the family attempts to put their fierce political differences aside for a benefit production, a historic performance that funded the William Shakespeare statue still standing in Central Park today.