I hope you saved a sparkler and some BBQ to enjoy as you read guest blogger Charles Weinberg’s directorial vision for Sondheim’s controversial musical Assassins.
I’ve been working on a production of Assassins in my head for the past two years. It should be noted I’ve never seen a production of the musical (or really any musical for that matter). In a way, this might work to my advantage, freeing up some directorial decisions. The way I picture the musical in my head is that it’s set in Lee Harvey’s head; since I’m producing this, that puts Oswald’s head inside my head. Inside his head are the voices of all past assassins, successful and not, manifestations of his mental illness wrestling with his conscience.
Once the multiple frame narratives are established, it gets chronological, starting with Booth. Lincoln will be in the “actual” audience, watching My American Cousin on a stage on top of the stage. The audience, in turn, becomes part of the cast: an audience playing the part of the audience. As Hamlet refers to his distracted globe on the stage at the Globe, so the theater becomes a symbol for the mind, a collective consciousness of what it means to be “American”, and just as “everyone has the right to shoot the president” is a perversion of the American dream, so the contradictory and disparate components of the audience suggest a sense of national schizophrenia–allusive to the schism that divided the nation and allowed for John Wilkes Booth to exist. To quote Lincoln quoting the Bible: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” so it is with the mind in Jim Stevens’s poem “Schizophrenia.” To recap…we have voices inside the voices of the voices, we have symbols inside the symbols of the symbols, and we have allusions to allusions inside allusions.
“How I Saved Roosevelt” presents the same opportunities of experimentation with the fourth wall, since it’s a song from the crowd, where individuals attempt to rise above their anonymity (and, in doing so, parallel the assassin they thwart) by taking credit for saving the president’s life. These actors are also spread throughout the audience.
“Gun Song/The Ballad of Czolgosz” is one of my favorite parts of the musical–a Marxist analysis of the labor required to produce a gun (”It takes a lot of men to make a gun, hundreds, many men to make a gun. Men in the mines to dig the iron, men in the mills to forge the steel, men at machines to turn the barrel, mold the trigger, shape the wheel.”). And then, the actual Marxist–Czolgosz. A Marxist analysis of a Marxist (again, all in the head of Oswald, a man who wrestled with his own conflicting attitudes toward U.S.-Cuban relations in a cold war era), represented in a Brechtian method (himself, a Marxist).
The score itself does a fine job of complementing setting–period pieces and genre hopping from banjo’d folk (“Ballad of Booth”), Sousa-style marches (“How I Saved Roosevelt”), Copland-esque song for the every man (“Ballad of Guiteau”) to AM gold (“Unworthy of Your Love”). The eclecticism creates a pastiche, a simulacrum of precedents, like Oswald himself in relation to all who came before him. With this in mind, I want one actor playing all the assassins, distinguishable only through costume.
Guest blogger Charles Weinberg feels that if he is guilty, then God is as well. Nonetheless, he encourages us all to look on the bright side.
# 5: Guest blog on Gypsy
# 4: Density and Intensity
# 3: Lyrics as conversation and dialogue
# 2: Lyrics as expression of character and dramatic theme
# 1: Lyrics as expression of complexity
