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Front and Center: Roundabout Theater Subscriber Magazine
Winter 2004
by Don Shewey
“There
is such a thing as pleasurable learning, cheerful and militant
learning.” — Bertolt Brecht
Assassins, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s vaudeville
about violence directed at American Presidents, may be one of
the most unusual and remarkable musicals written in the 20th century.
The master of modern American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim,
wouldn’t necessarily ally himself with Bertolt Brecht, the
master of modern German drama. As an artist, Sondheim’s
work is psychological where Brecht’s is political. But the
two artists share a couple of important ideas about theatre that
are worth thinking about as Roundabout prepares its long-awaited
production of Assassins. One idea is that theatre
is an art form that thrives on overturning expectations. The other
is that it’s the audience’s job to complete each play
with its own thoughtful response, not simply to nod and agree
and swallow it whole.
Easier said
than done!
Bertolt Brecht,
who influenced virtually all modern theatre that departs from
kitchen-sink naturalism, was a big champion of theatre as a forum
for instruction. To him, instruction meant not telling people
what to think (although as a Marxist, he definitely had his own
values to promote), but challenging audiences to figure out how
to think. His fantasy was that critical thinking–that is,
imagining how things could be different than they are now–could
not only be acquired through theatregoing, but could spur critical
thinking on political and social issues.
Brecht believed
critical thinking could best be fostered by putting the incidents
of a play through a process of alienation. By alienation, he meant
turning the familiar into something strange or vice versa, “the
alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something
seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means
that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.”
Critical thinking means being alive and alert at the theatre rather
than dozing through a pleasant entertainment.
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“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of
light but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure,
however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
— Carl Jung
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In a long
career not noted for its timidity, Sondheim hit a new level of
audacity with Assassins, his 1991 collaboration with book writer
John Weidman. The musical raises fascinating questions: Are the
country’s history of presidential assassinations a manifestation
of America’s love/hate affair with guns, power, and violence?
Or are they acts of violence by lone psychotics who represent
some aberrant striving common to all Americans–for attention,
celebrity, and media coverage?
Tales
from the Dark Side
Sondheim and Weidman explore these questions in a dark, surreal
dreamscape that ends with half a dozen historical presidential
assassins—from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley—circling
a suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald. They urge him to turn the gun away
from himself and aim it at the presidential motorcade passing
through Dallas. Killing Kennedy would thereby redeem their tribe
of embittered losers.
Stephen Sondheim
This is not
the usual stuff of Broadway musicals, but then Sondheim and his
various collaborators have spent several decades now creating
shows that buck the traditional conception of musical theatre
as the province of lightweight song-and-dance spectacles. Assassins
has acquired a reputation for being too dangerous to produce on
Broadway; that notion may be somewhat inflated. The original Off-Broadway
production sold out every performance, despite mixed reviews and
opening in the midst of the Gulf War. That it didn’t immediately
move to Broadway says more about the timidity of commercial producers
than about the content of the show.
True, Assassins
focuses on nine people who killed or tried to kill American presidents.
But the musical portrays them as human beings rather than alien
monsters, it doesn’t ask us to sympathize with them or forgive
them. It’s certainly no harder to take than Sweeney
Todd, Sondheim’s musical about a barber who slits
the throats of his customers and his neighbor who bakes their
ground-up bodies into best-selling pies. That show ran for a year
and a half on Broadway and won all the awards that season.
A jaunty,
irreverent comic tone also contributes to the perception of Assassins
as too dangerous for Broadway audiences. Roundabout Theatre Company’s
revival was originally scheduled for the fall of 2001 and cancelled
after the events of 9/11. The authors issued a statement acknowledging
that the show “asks audiences to think critically about
various aspects of the American experience” and their feeling
was that “this is not an appropriate time to present a show
that makes such a demand.” This was tactful on their part,
although it could also be argued that there was never a time when
we more urgently needed to understand the mentality that leads
to such acts of world-changing destruction.
Shooting
Sprees
American life in the last decade has had no shortage of tragic
events exposing the same problems of guns and violence that Assassins
addresses. Yet during the same period the tabloid-fueled cult
of celebrity and the circus-like media coverage of famous people
(including those accused of crimes) has gotten more and more out
of hand. We’ve gotten used to seeing sacred cows satirized
on “Saturday Night Live” or in National Lampoon magazine
(of which Weidman is a former editor). As the late Quentin Crisp
once advised, “If you do something terrible, go on television
and talk about it. Then people will cross the street to tell you
they saw you on TV.”
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“They got a name for the winners in the world.
I want a name when I lose.”
— Steely Dan.
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What makes
Assassins genuinely challenging, even creepy,
is that it stirs up all sorts of provocative questions without
providing any answers. It specifically declines to offer the audience
the soothing safety of a moral conclusion to either accept or
reject. It’s up to us to sort out what we think about the
conundrums it raises—the ever blurrier line between power
and publicity, for instance, or the connection between the constitutional
right to bear arms and the easy access to handguns that allows
high-school kids to go on shooting sprees.
When the musical’s
beguiling opening number features a carnival barker crooning the
seductively optimistic sentiment, “Everybody’s got
the right to be happy… everybody’s got the right to
their dreams,” he seems to be doing nothing more than restating
the values at the heart of America, land of the free and home
of the brave. But do we really agree with him? Isn’t that
the same guy who just suggested to a passerby, “C’mere
and kill a president”?
Ugly
Truths & Ambiguities
In some ways, Assassins is the continuation of
an inquiry that Sondheim and Weidman began with their first musical-theatre
collaboration, Pacific Overtures (1976). The
historical event on which that show pivots is the signing of the
treaty opening trade relations between Japan and the West in 1853.
But the song that covers that part of the story (“Someone
in a Tree”) is sung not by the men who signed the treaty—the
Emperor of Japan and Commodore Perry—but by a ten-year-old
boy who saw everything from a tree outside the treaty house but
heard nothing, and a warrior hidden beneath the floorboards who
heard everything and saw nothing. Both Pacific Overtures
and Assassins ask, “Who gets to tell the
story? What doubts and ambiguities, ugly truths and indigestible
contradictions get smoothed over in the retelling? What voices
does the official history leave out?”
Assassins
does have a narrator of sorts, the character of The Balladeer.
But he plays a highly ambiguous role in the show. On one level
he gives the audience someone to identify with who is not an assassin,
and his optimistic folk-based songs represent the received wisdom
of history, simplified for the masses. Disconcert-ingly, the other
characters drive him offstage two-thirds of the way through the
play. Is that because he’s too much of a conscience or a
reality check, forcing them to consider whether their acts accomplished
what they were intended to do? Or is it because his sunny platitudes
made no room for the discontent, disillusionment, and political
outrage that seethes in the hearts of those who feel left out
of the American dream? Sondheim and Weidman aren’t telling.
It’s
up to you to decide.
Don Shewey
is the author of the biography Sam Shepard and frequently contributes
articles about theatre to the “Arts & Leisure”
section of the New York Times. An archive of his writings is available
online at www.donshewey.com.
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