'Assassins' Rocks the Relevance

A few Tuesdays ago, a little after 11 at night, a bottle of champagne was making the rounds. Everyone was hugging. I had called up friends from home and discovered that I didn’t have anything to say, so we just laughed. But when I saw Barack Obama finally take the stage in Chicago’s Hyde Park, a little voice cut through the happy fog: “What if he gets shot?”

This is why the best thing about the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins,” produced by Daniel V. Kroop ’10 and Katherine K. Schick ’10, is the timing. “Let’s imagine the worst case scenario,” this play seems to say. “Let’s see what this national nightmare would look like.” Last Friday’s performance wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. You won’t see another piece of theater anywhere on campus that feels this viscerally relevant.

Political assassinations happen all over the world, but there is something distinctly American about the act, some combination of violence, theatricality, and grotesque individual ambition that resonates in the bones of the culture. As Sondheim sees them, America’s Presidential assassins—there are nine, five of whom got their man—are a petty, volatile, and above all fame-hungry bunch, turning the American Dream back against the country that brought it into being. “Everybody’s got the right to their dreams,” goes the opening chorus.

It’s a twisted, carnivalesque historical outlook that’s made visually literal by the set design of Sally H. Rinehart ’09 and Davone J Tines ’09. A Presidential shooting gallery—“Shoot a Prez! Win a prize!”—sits center stage, and a twinkling Ferris wheel looms to the right. This is the kind of timeless, dreamy setting that could only exist in a theater.

It’s a great idea, but unfortunately it’s not a new one. Joe Mantello’s “Assassins, which appeared on Broadway four years ago,” had the same shooting gallery, and this production also copies its 2004 predecessor by merging the roles of the Balladeer—the show’s singing narrator—and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Last Friday’s production may have come off without any major hitch, but there was a nagging feeling that the sparks didn’t fly, that it never reached out to rough up the prevailing mood of Hope and Change. Some directorial risk-taking would have helped.

Still, the main thing about “Assassins” is the assassins, and this cast has some seriously talented standouts. The best, by a lot, is Alison H. Rich ’09. She played Samuel Byck, who, in Feburary of 1974, tried to hijack a plane, crash it into the White House, and kill Nixon. Instead, after killing a cop and a pilot, he killed himself.

Byck had a habit of taping insane monololgues and mailing them off to people like Leonard Bernstein ’39, and this is how Rich spent her time onstage. Alone, dressed in a Santa suit, scarfing down cokes and cheeseburgers, her charismatic madness caromed all over. She delivered some of the night’s funniest lines, which is saying something. She had stiff competition, especially from the happy idiot and failed Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore, played by Megan L. Amram ’10.

But what made Rich’s performance special was the desperation and fear lurking behind every joke. At the end of her final monologue, speaking into the recorder, she asked Nixon a question: How do you trust a government where each party is constantly telling you not to trust the other one? How is that not like a father telling his scared kid, “Your mommy doesn’t love you, but I do?” Someone has to be lying. So Byck tried to kill the President.

Rich wasn’t the only highlight. Steven A. Travierso ’09 was terrific as Lee Harvey Oswald, wringing a real character out of four and a half decades of speculation and myth-making.

Sondheim’s theory is that Oswald had only planned to kill himself at the book depository that day. This may be a dumb idea, an example of Sondheim’s narrow-minded insistence on seeing almost everything as the product of personal trauma, but Travierso, his torso quaking beneath his t-shirt, made the whole thing real.

Travierso can also sing. As the Balladeer, he played a central role in executing Sondheim’s gorgeous score. “Assassins” is riddled with bits of American musical history, from the broad, open harmonies of folk to gospel’s ecstatic fervor. Even Sousa marches get their moments. In songs like “The Ballad of Booth” and (especially) “The Ballad of Czolgosz,” you could hear the country’s musical heritage talking to itself.

“Assassins” is predicated on the idea that history can be made to converse with itself, and so a lot of the show’s success or failure depends on the cast’s ability to harness the propulsive energies of its musical reference points. Friday’s performance had problems—too many words got lost in the shuffle—but the musical direction of Kyle J. Dancewicz ’11 kept things moving.

There was one exception. “Something Just Broke,” which follows the assassination of JFK, is the only song in which the play’s assassins don’t sing. Instead, it’s citizens we hear, people remembering where they were when they heard the news. For a few different reasons—pitch troubles, difficulties with microphones—it never got off the ground.

But here’s what the song was supposed to say: Every Presidential assassination creates deep national wounds. It doesn’t matter how loved or loathed the President is. When a country puts somebody in office and then kills him, some part of the nation’s machinery snaps. Something breaks.

And maybe that’s why the fear jumped up inside me watching Obama take the stage on election night. For myself, and for most of my friends, this is the first time it’s seemed that our politics are really working. But what if they break? This “Assassins” may need work, but its black, smiling “What if?” came through loud and clear.

—Staff writer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu