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John Wilkes Booth stands in the center of the stage, flanked by the presidential assassins and would-be presidential assassins whofollow him in a thin line of carnage stretching from 1865 to 1981.
“Everybody’s got the right to be happy,” he sings.
The stage and tone are set, half carnival midway, half dinner theater, as these historical figures— Charles Guiteau, who killed James Garfield in 1881; Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley in 1901; Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to kill Franklin Roosevelt in 1933; Samuel Byck, who tried to kill Richard Nixon in 1974; Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, who made separate attempts on Gerald Ford’s life in 1975; and John Hinkley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 — mingle together in a theatrical present. A minute or so later, they’re all singing together: “Everyone’s got the right to their dreams.”
There’s a glaring exception to that list, of course. But you know it’s coming.
Stephen Sondheim’s and John Weidman’s Assassins — now playing at the Yale Repetory Theater until April 8 — has met with acclaim and outrage since it first hit the stage in 1990; a 2004 Broadway production won five Tony awards, including one for best revival. The musical’s conceit is to understand presidential assassinations as what happen when American values somehow curdle, perhaps due to thwarted ambition, or a sense of injustice, or a feeling of personal failure, or mental instability — or, in several of the characters, some combination of these. As the musical moves from character to character, it almost always plays on its themes for laughs — uncomfortable, pointed laughs, but laughs nonetheless — meaning that the show demands full commitment from the actors. When the actors pull guns on each other, or on the audience, or (in one case) on a child, the jokes have to land, hard.
An unfunny production of Assassins would be unwatchable. It’s a tricky musical to put on.
The cast assembled at the Yale Rep make walking this comedic tightrope look easy. Robert Lenzi plays Booth, the “pioneer” and ringleader, as somehow both imposing and insecure, a failed actor who also believes he’s another Brutus, slaying a tyrant. Stephen DeRosa’s Guiteau is a deluded religious zealot, hilarious right up to his showstopper hanging. P.J. Griffith makes Czolgosz an empathic figure, an immigrant who never had a chance, and somehow turns loneliness and a little bit of ideology into a recipe for homicide. Stanley Bahorek’s Zangara, meanwhile, is filled with rage. Richard B. Henry’s Samuel Byck plays as a man who never caught a break, until it breaks him. Lucas Dixon’s John Hinkley is an expertly realized awkward sad sack.
And Lauren Molina and Julia Murney, as would-be assassins Fromme and Moore, make a powerful comedic team. In real life, Fromme and Moore never met, though a mere 17 days separated their assassination attempts, both in California. Sondheim’s and Weidman’s theatrical conceit is that Fromme and Moore become hapless co-conspirators with outrageously inept results, and it’s in their interactions where the bleak comedy perhaps works best and bites hardest. Fromme is a member of the Manson Family, still completely devoted to the cause four years after Manson’s and his accomplices’ imprisonment for the heinous murders they committed. Moore clearly suffers from mental illness and has the wreckage of a personal life to prove it. None of this is out of bounds for humor, and Molina and Murvey dive in headfirst. In a play full of harrowing performances, theirs is perhaps the most harrowing, and the most successful.
The series of brave performances make Assassins resonate with today in startling ways. Booth’s statement near the play’s beginning that “the country is not what it was” — from which he draws enough anger to kill a president — feels timely. So does the lefty talk, and its violent consequences, that permeate Fromme’s and Moore’s conversation about why they’ve had it with Gerald Ford. Assassins pays attention to the people left out of the American Dream, the people left behind, a theme that would likely work for any time. The production team’s deft use of lighting and its set — a series of screens that projects the faces of the assassins and their victims — likewise help pull the individual assassins’ stories out of their own times and into conversation with each other, creating striking parallels among them.
But a particular move in Assassins also might show its age. The one left out at the beginning — Lee Harvey Oswald — finally makes his appearance at the play’s end, and suddenly all the humor is gone. As Oswald, Dylan Frederick is stunning; he’s fragile and angry, more suicidal than homicidal, and in the conceit of the musical, a man goaded literally by the spirits of the assassins who came before him and the ones who are coming later, urging him to take his place in history.
The sharp turn from comedy to drama is a little puzzling. A cynical reading might suggest that as dark as the humor gets, Sondheim and Weidman decided that, in 1991, joking about JFK was going too far for their intended audience. They decided to play it safe. But if that was too much, why are all the other killings fair game? Why are they safe targets? The death toll includes not only the presidents, but all of the assassins, Zangara, the victims of the Manson Family (whom Fromme mentions with icy blitheness), and Byck, who attempted to hijack a plane intending to fly it into the White House. The plane he took over never left the ground, and he shot three people, two of them fatally, before killing himself during a police standoff on the runway. None of that even makes it in the play at all.
A less cynical reading of the play’s ending suggests that, in the final act, Sondheim and Weidman intentionally pull the rug out from under their own humor, to point out the ways that we’ve become complicit in the assassins’ own mythmaking. Writers and audiences alike are drawn to their stories. We want to know why they did it. We want to know what makes them tick, even though we could have all the explanation in the world and it would never quite add up. It seems like such a human impulse to stare, the same one that makes people rubberneck or watch true crime stories. Draining all the humor out of the end, though, points out not just the ugliness in what the assassins did, but the ugliness in being fascinated by them. Which makes Assassins as much a musical about the ugliness in us.
Which is it? Did Sondheim and Weidman cop out or go all the way? Is the screening of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination in its gory entirety at the end of the production exploitative or earned?
Whatever the case, Yale Rep is to be commended for putting on this thought-provoking production, and the cast in particular for gazing into the abyss of this acerbically funny, dark-hearted musical, which most chillingly reminds us that if presidential assassinations are an American tradition, then at some point it will happen again.
Yale Repertory Theater’s production of Assassins plays at University Theater, 222 York Street, through April 8. Click here for tickets and more information.