Assassins

This season for whatever reason—and far be it from me to speculate—three theater companies in the nation’s capital are presenting Stephen Sondheim’s tunefully insolent tribute to presidential assassins.

Well, tribute might not quite be right. The story told in Sondheim’s music and lyrics and John Weidman’s book is actually more a theatrical visit to the psyches and societal crises of misfits who share with us why they felt compelled to kill. All set in a colorful carnival.

First of the three to open is a delightfully sassy Assassins from Pallas Theatre Collective produced by Tracey Elaine Chessum. (Next up this month is Next Stop’s, and Dominion Stage has another on the way in January.) Pallas has a track record of staging with panache contemporary musicals with political bite, and Assassins terrifically showcases the company’s audacious command of the form.

The killer cast: Karen Lange (Sara Jane Moore), Taylor Rieland (John Hinckley), Tyler Cramer (Samuel Byck), Andrew Keller (John Wilkes Booth), Topher Williams (Guiseppe Zangara), Zach Brewster-Geisz (Charles Guiteau), and Alex Palting as (Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme) in Assassins. Photo by Teresa Castracane Photography, LLC.

The carny setting of the show is suggested by circusy strands of lights strung from the ceiling and stuffed animals hung on the black backdrop like shooting gallery prizes. “Come here and kill a president!” barks the Proprietor (Alex Thompson) at the top of the show. And we’re off and running—with the sagas of nine actual assassins (a few who were would-be, most who did not throw away their shot).

The cast list is an actual rogues’ gallery: John Wilkes Booth (Andrew Keller), who shot Abraham Lincoln. Leon Czolgoz (an impressive Brendan McMahon), who shot William McKinley. John Hinkley (Taylor Rieland), who shot Ronald Reagan. Samuel Byck (Tyler Cramer), who plotted to kill Richard Nixon by crashing a plane into the White House. Giuseppe Zangara (an intense Topher Williams), who aimed at Franklyn Delano Roosevelt but shot the mayor of Chicago. Charles Guiteau (Zach Brewster Geisz), who shot James A. Garfield. Sara Jane Moore (Karen Lange) and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Alex Palting), who both fumblingly tried to kill a bumbling Gerald Ford (and who have some of the funniest scenes together in the show). And last and most famously, Lee Harvey Oswald (Andrew Flurer, a dead ringer his character)), who shot John F. Kennedy.

Each of their stories is told in scene and song, in an inventive variety of staging styles, in music that echoes each era, the actors wearing clothing of each period by Costume Designer Joan Lawrence. For instance, Palting as Fromme and Rieland as Hinkley are paired in a marvelous duet called “Unworthy of Your Love,” which Hinkley sings to his inspiration, Jody Foster, and Fromme sings to hers, Charles Manson. It’s weird but it works. Which well can be said of the whole show.

Ensemble members Gabriel Brumberg, Mason Catharini, Jenna Murphy, Andrew Flurer, and Marc Pavan in Assassins. Photo by Teresa Castracane Photography, LLC

Also in the cast are Will Hawkins as an agreeably voiced Balladeer, Christine Callsen as the anarchist Emma Goldman, the young Gabriel Brumberg as Moore’s son Billy, and a versatile Ensemble that includes (in addition to the performers named above) Mason Catharini, Mark Pavan, Jenna Murphy, and Camryn Shegogue.

Director Clare Shaffer has ingeniously shoehorned the show into the black box at Logan by casting actors who double as musicians, such that at times they are the orchestra seated stage left and right and at times they are center stage singing and dancing and playing their instruments. The carnivalesque quotient of this choice pays off enormously in pleasure. Choreographer Pauline Lamb’s dance moves bring an infectious energy. Lighting Designer E-hui Woo creates beautifully moving effects during songs. And Sound Designer Reid May injects a variety of gunshots from the firearms obtained by Weapon Props Designer Brian Dettling.

The very idea of a musical about presidential assassins is a charged, nervy concept, and as executed by Pallas Theatre Collective the material is entertaining and unsettling in equal measure. There are a lot of guns in the show. There’s even a song in praise of them, “Gun Song.” And there’s a lot of anguished monologing about the disillusionments, deprivations, and despair that motivated how the guns came to be used. They’re all fake stage firearms, of course, but in the hands of this killer cast, they can give one a triggering jolt, as happened to me during the show’s startling choreographed finish.

The entire cohort of assassins has a big musical number near the end in which they each have a lyric that finishes the sentence “I did it because…” Clearly, this musical wants us to attend to the assassins’ interior lives in order to understand who they were as people and why they did what they did. Not to condone what they did. Not to make them out to be heroes or sympathetic. But to reckon with what made them each tick and not just dismiss them as deranged.

That’s a big ask. To know your answer, see the show.

Running Time: One hour 45 minutes, with no intermission.

Assassins plays through October 15, 2017, at Pallas Theatre Collective performing at the Logan Fringe Arts Space’s Trinidad Theatre – 1358 Florida Avenue, NE, in Washington, DC. For tickets, purchase them online.

 

Blood at the Root

Hard to imagine a dramatic work more perfect for undergraduate actors or more pertinent to the racial tensions of our times than Dominique Morisseau’s trenchant Blood at the Root, now playing in a riveting production at Howard University.

To put this play’s immediacy in context, racist hate speech in the form of so-called noose incidents has reared its ugly head in the capital area recently, including at colleges and the Smithsonian’s African-American history museum. In Blood at the Root, exactly such a bigoted act drives the action. The title comes from the protest song “Strange Fruit”—

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root 
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…

—and in Morisseau’s play the title evokes the heavy weight of history that underlies each act of race hate today.

Morisseau’s script was written specifically for six M.F.A. acting students whom she worked with and got to know during a residence at Penn State School of Theatre. By happenstance, three of the actors were black and three were white.

In the news at the time was the story of the Jena Six. This was a case of six black teenagers who were convicted in the beating of a white student at a high school in Jena, Louisiana. There was a particular tree where only white students sat. The day after black students tried to sit there, nooses appeared in the tree. A schoolyard fight broke out. The six black students were charged with attempted murder. The injustice of that outcome troubled Morisseau, and as she talked about it with the acting students, she recognized the opportunity to build an important play around it.

Playwright Dominique Morisseau. Photo courtesy of Studio Theatre.

Unusual for a work based on real events, one is never made aware that headlines preceded the play and “explain” what happens and why; rather, Morisseau’s drama arises plausibly and believably solely from her fictional characters and setting, a high school in Richmond, Virginia.

The distinctive features of Morisseau’s script are exceptionally well played in the Howard production. Notably, for instance, nearly all the two-character scenes are between a black student and a white student—as such they are bristling with issues—and each of the characters has at least one eye-opening monologue. There are also powerful passages in the form of a choreopoem played by all the actors at once. Morisseau’s writing is electrifying—as is evident in her Skeleton Crew, now running at Studio Theatre—and the Howard cast delivers it with compelling conviction: Adanna Paul (Raylynn), Austin T Farrow (Justin), Isaiah Reed (De’Andre), Kathryn Miller (Asha), Luke Risher (Colin), Nicole Vaughan (Toria), Shwneé Owens (Principal Miller).

Director Goldie Patrick has done an outstanding job of creating a credible sense of daily life at a high school, not only in casting the speaking roles but by incorporating an ensemble of nine who are not in the script (Brittaney Duhaney, Emmanual Key, Imani Branch, Kalen Robinson, Kasheem Fowler-Bryant, Olivia Dorsey, Paul Gatlin, Sophia Early, and Tyree Austin).  Vividly in characters they created, they stride across the stage between scenes as between classes and support the action in other important ways, as during a student protest demonstration and in movement by Choreographer Christopher Law. It’s impossible to imagine Morisseau’s play working as well without them.

As if to underscore how lines get drawn on the basis of race, Set Designer Michael Stephawany paints on the black floor a white Mondrian-like grid that is echoed on the upstage wall. A montage of speeded-up footage documenting America’s legacy of racism begins the show, with a mix featuring “Strange Fruit” by Sound Designer Cresent Haynes. Lighting Designer TW Starnes complements the staging’s urgent momentum. And Costume Supervisor Kendra Rai selects lots of shorts and shades of red to capture the sweltering October heat in the story.

Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root is a breakthrough contribution to the conversation on race in America and a unique instance of how art can inspire young people to conscientious action against injustice. The production at Howard does Morisseau’s work all the justice it deserves and can be highly recommended.

Running Time: One hour 20 minutes, with no intermission.

Blood at the Root plays through Saturday, October 14, 2017, at The Howard University’s Al Freeman Jr. Environmental Theatre Space in Childers Hall – 2455 6th Street NW, in Washington, DC.  Tickets may be purchased from the box office, (202) 806- 7700, or online.