`Aim for what you want a lot
-Everybody gets a shot.
Everybody`s got the right
to their dreams.”
-”Everybody`s Got the Right” from ”Assassins”
Although it was born of a revolt and later endured a civil war, the United States has no real history of revolution. We`ve had no Latin juntas regularly seizing power, no European coups, no massive class or ethnic insurrections.
What we have instead are elections-and a tradition of shooting the president.
”Our assassins are one of the things that set us apart from other countries. They`re so peculiarly American,” says John Weidman-who, with lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim, is the co-creator of the musical
”Assassins.” The show is receiving its first production outside New York this week at Theatre Three in Dallas.
”Assassins” is the first Stephen Sondheim musical that did not go directly to Broadway-after its off-Broadway debut in January 1991. In addition, the cliff-hanging financial distress of Theatre Three forced the 31- year-old Dallas institution nearly to abandon the season-opening production.
The subject has undeniable reverberations. ”Assassins” is being staged on the heels of Oliver Stone`s ”JFK”-and in Dallas. Its material makes the show immediate, local, historic and provocative: The final scene of the musical takes place on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Since deranged house painter Richard Lawrence pointed a gun at Andrew Jackson in 1835-the gun misfired-13 people have tried to kill the president of the United States. That`s about 1 every 12 years, though it says a great deal about recent American political history that 4 of the 13 attempts have occurred in the last 20 years.
Yet, as James Clarke argues in his 1992 book, ”American Assassins,”
only two of the killers or would-be killers-Leon Czolgosz, who shot William McKinley in 1901, and John Wilkes Booth, who shot Abraham Lincoln in 1865-had something approaching rational politics.
In Booth`s case, it was the Southern cause in the Civil War; with Czolgosz, it was that of revolutionary anarchism.
”I killed the president,” Czolgosz said before his execution, ”because he was the enemy of the good people-the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”
In short, American assassins tend not to be revolutionaries or terrorists. ”You can disagree with the aims of the IRA (the Irish Republican Army),” Weidman says. ”But if an IRA member takes a shot at the queen of England, he has an articulated cause” deriving from the long history of political conflict between his organization and her government.
In contrast, American assassins generally have no larger cause than their own sense of grievance or need for attention. If they do have any political consciousness, Clark writes, it`s mostly a matter of seeking approval.
”No black man has ever tried to kill the president, for instance,”
Weidman points out. ”And only Czolgosz could believably describe himself as economically oppressed.”
Their bitter, formless nature is one reason gunmen such as Arthur Bremer
(who shot George Wallace) or Lee Harvey Oswald hold a certain fascination. They combine the obsessive, the mysterious and the banal.
Determining conspiracy or motivation is often a case of fill-in-the-blank: They either have no settled identity or one so commonplace as to be nearly invisible.
So these Americans who have grabbed a gun and pointed it at a president are pretty much who you think they are. The disturbed, Weidman says, the emotionally outcast, the celebrity wannabes. The losers. ”Not so much economic outsiders,” Weidman cautions, ”as psychological outsiders.”
This is why it has been so easy to dismiss them as mere cranks. But though they may not fit in the context of organized ideologies, Weidman argues, they can be understood in terms of the American psyche.
”There is a discrepancy in this country between who we say we are, what we promise and what people can actually achieve,” he says.
”It`s not only that America is the place where dreams can come true, it`s become where they should, where they must come true. But if you fail trying to attain your dream, then something must be wrong with you or with the promise. Someone must be held responsible. These people have resolved that discrepancy in a very frightening way.”
Accordingly, many assassins are not really ”anti-American” or even anti-capitalist. Instead, Weidman says, they see themselves as trying to rectify things, trying to fulfill American ideals they feel have been denied them.
In effect, the American promise of personal fulfillment has shifted terms. It may never have been true that anyone in America could grow up to be president. But it has always been true that anyone can grow up to kill one.
”To have it suggested by reviewers that Steve and I picked this piece simply to be daring is galling,” says Weidman.
”Of course, someone would have to be deliberately myopic not to realize the material is out of the ordinary. But the notion that we did it just to be different or challenging is a complete misunderstanding of the creative process.”
The son of Jerome Weidman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning bookwriter of
”Fiorello!” and ”I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” John Weidman first collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on the 1976 musical ”Pacific Overtures.” Since then, the 45-year-old writer has co-written the book for the Lincoln Center revival of ”Anything Goes” and has worked as an editor of National Lampoon and a writer for ”Sesame Street.”
As outrageous, even contrary, as it might seem, the idea of doing a musical about presidential assassins is a logical development for Sondheim-the creative mind behind 1964`s ”Anyone Can Whistle,” a musical about a corrupt town and its asylum escapees, and 1979`s ”Sweeney Todd,” about a razor-wielding multiple murderer.
Weidman and Sondheim were aware that ”Assassins” would be a risk on Broadway, so they made plans to premiere it off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Sondheim was comfortable there, having worked at Playwrights on
”Sunday in the Park with George” and ”Into the Woods.”
But in frustrated hindsight, Weidman says, the choice of Playwrights Horizons may have prevented the show from moving to Broadway even though 10,147 people saw the sold-out run at Playwrights.
The limited-run nature of the theater`s season meant that the producers of ”Assassins” had a very short time in which to raise the necessary $1.25 million for the move. A mixed review from The New York Times also hindered chances, so ”Assassins” was allowed to die.
In fact, ”Assassins” was met with doubts about its propriety as a potential Broadway musical. It seems Broadway shows can be filled with baggy- pants comedians and underdressed chorus girls, but as Martin Gottfried sniffed in his 1991 coffee-table book, ”More Broadway Musicals since 1980,” ”The offensiveness of a song-and-dance Lee Harvey Oswald could not be overlooked.”
”I was surprised,” says Weidman, ”not that people asked about the tastefulness of the show but the number of times the question came up. If one set out to write a play like this, absolutely no one would question its dramatic sense. But for many people there`s something about a musical that automatically trivializes the theme.
”My own feeling is that the musical theater form is enormously flexible,” he says. ”One of its joys is to take the form and let it follow content.”
