Review: ASSASSINS Is Tragically Topical at Split Stage

The Pittsburgh area extends beyond the Cultural District for about an hour in any given direction. As such, the Pittsburgh theatre scene is far-flung and diverse, putting down roots in communities all over Westmoreland and Allegheny county. One such location is Split Stage, a Murraysville-born, Greensburg-based non-equity professional theatre focused on producing edgier and less mainstream material than fellow Greensburg professional theatre Stage Right!, which tends towards broad demographics or family audiences. (Because of my near-constant employment at Stage Right!, I can't actually review any of their shows here, but look for an article about them in the future.)

Split Stage also differentiates itself from other Greensburg-area theatre groups by offering a wide range of artistic offerings. While Stage Right! focuses on musicals, and Greensburg Civic Theatre produces musicals and plays, Split Stage! presents musicals, plays, comedy shows, big band concerts, Victorian-style carol choirs and other offerings as part of its mainstage season. Their latest offering is their most daring presentation yet- a musical about as safe as playing with dynamite.

Stephen Sondheim's Assassins is rarely revived due to its uncomfortable subject matter. It's a darkly comic concept musical revolving around a purgatorial fairground where successful and failed political assassins relive their struggles and moments of glory or failure, playing off each other regardless of time period or logic. It is a place, it is implied, where the American Dream goes to die.

Though charismatic John Wilkes Booth (Rob Jessup) is nominally in charge of the fairground as a father figure to the less experienced and dignified assassins, the show is genuinely run by two abstract figures. The Balladeer (Brendan Conaway) sings from the perspective of the American people, telling the tales of the assassins as folkloric aberrations of the American Dream; his darker counterpoint, the Proprietor (Nate Newell), lurks perpetually, often silently, around the fairground, insinuating whenever he crops up that maybe there is no American Dream, and that the violent behavior of the assassins is a result of America's unspoken prejudices and bigotries. By the end of the mostly-plotless show, the Balladeer is attacked by the mob of assassins and forcibly metamorphosed into Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who played a big part in killing the American dream in the public eye.

Sondheim, like Kurt Weill before him, writes his music for actors who can sing, not singers who can act. The cast of accomplished local character actors at Split Stage has more in common with the rougher, ragged sound of the Original Off-Broadway Cast than the lush theatrical richness of the Broadway Cast Recording. All members of the cast sing well, but it is appropriate that only Jessup, in the role of famed actor and orator Booth, sounds professionally trained. As directed by Laura Wurzell and musically directed by Aaron Mykel Gray, the line between sung and spoken blurs into almost Sprechstimme (one of Sondheim's favorite compositional techniques).

The men of the cast bring strongly diverse portrayals (in terms of characterization, anyway- a throwaway point in the show mentions that assassins tend to be white men) to their historical figures and footnotes. As the ludicrously Tigger-like Charles Guiteau, Ben Wren turns in a gleefully one-note performance as a man for whom a prayer meeting, a murder and his own execution are equally pleasant. Adam Grossett's Giuseppe Zangara finds drama, even horror in the tragicomic figure of an Italian-American so troubled by gastric distress that he attempts to shoot FDR. In the role of John Hinckley, Bill Elder's underplayed performance, complete with messy hair and quiet brooding, calls to mind the awkward beta-males with girl trouble who so often take to the Internet to vent their spleen, if they don't take to an automatic rifle and make the world pay for their heartache. Finally, in a mostly spoken role, Kevin Bass wavers madly on the precipice between pathos and apocalyptic rage as sad-clown Sam Byck, recording rambling tapes for public figures as he prepares to make a kamikaze attack on Richard Nixon in the White House.

Assassins is, by the choice of depicts, tilted towards men. Though Katie Kerr and Renee Rabenold provide ample comic relief as Gerald Ford's would-be assassins Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore, their place in the show does not extend much farther than comic relief, while the weightier material tends to go to the male assassins. The actress best showcased by this production is, in fact, a non-singing cameo: Hannah Brizzi, as political activist Emma Goldman. Brizzi brings a quiet charisma to the controversial woman in her sole scene, offering lovestruck anarchist Leon Czolgosz (Ryan Hadbavney) her political mission since she cannot offer him her body.

Wurzell pays tribute to a few of the Broadway production's most iconic moments, such as the attack on the Balladeer and his transformation into Lee Harvey Oswald. The show's cleverest conceit, however, is a new one: Nate Newell's Proprietor, as he lurks around the set, gradually transforms in appearance from a natty, dapper fellow from the Gay Nineties into a dirty, glowering skinhead. Though he says very little between the opening and the finale, he remains forever present, seemingly embodying the current menace of "domestic terrorism" from disenfranchised white men with guns and desires for attention. Indeed, when John Wilkes Booth repeats the phrase "Attention must be paid," from Death of a Salesman, during his devilish pep talk to Oswald, it's nearly impossible not to think of the way atrocities are often committed today by attention seekers. Tellingly, however, the final scene begins not with the assassins gloating (the haunting final image of the play), but with the ensemble, playing America's anonymous citizens, noting that "Something Just Broke" when they heard about the death of a president they didn't know personally. This song names neither the presidents nor the assassins by name.

It would be dangerous to imply any specific political message in this show or this production. It is, after all, both a work of art and a work of history. However, I am part of a generation that barely remembers life before Columbine, before Timothy McVeigh, before 9/11. To young and young-ish millennials, mass shootings and acts of terrorism have become so common, so almost accepted, that they barely appall and no longer even surprise. This is simply how the world works now, for worse and not for better. As a cultural barometer of the growing violence and ennui of the twenty-first century, Assassins was, and is, both shockingly prophetic and all too timely.

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