On Jun. 30, 1882, at the gallows where he was to be hanged for shooting President James Garfield, Charles Guiteau danced toward the noose, smiling and waving to the crowd. Guiteau, much to the bewilderment of the audience, began reciting a poem he composed called “I am Going to the Lordy,” turning his execution into a performance.
This event and other dark yet comical scenes like it make up Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Assassins,” which is to be put on by the UCLA production company Act III Theatre Ensemble on March 1 and 2 in Schoenberg Hall.
“One of the big challenges of dealing with such serious issues like presidential assassinations is that they were such traumatizing moments for American people,” said Abby Faber, a second-year theater student and director of “Assassins.” “We want to honor that, but at the same time highlight that they did these funny and weird things.”
“Assassins” tells the stories of America’s most notorious presidential killers, such as John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. The musical is told through a series of vignettes and examines the events that led each assassin to murder or attempted murder, and their respective motivations.
In several scenes, the assassins cross space and time to interact with each other, adding a fantastical aspect to an otherwise historical production. These often lead to comedic encounters that foreshadow the assassinations, such as a bar scene in which they drunkenly groan about presidents and encourage each other to kill.
Despite these humorous interjections, Kyle Frattini, a first-year musical theater student who plays Oswald, said “Assassins” tackles serious themes like gun control and mental illness.
“These characters are disillusioned with the American dream and the goal of this show is to get across that these were real people with real problems,” Frattini said.
Frattini said one vignette in “Assassins” describes Oswald’s difficult life as he cycles in and out of the army and is plagued by marital problems that ultimately leads him to become suicidal.
Landen Baldwin, a second-year linguistics student who plays John Hinckley Jr., said it was challenging to balance the comedy and drama. Hinckley fell in love with Jodie Foster after seeing her in the film “Taxi Driver,” which prompted him to nearly kill then-President Ronald Reagan to impress her.
“Finding the line between humor and gravity pushes you to think critically about how much truth each assassin’s story holds,” Baldwin said. “It opens one’s mind to looking at both sides of the story no matter how unpleasant.”
Baldwin said the musical presents an otherwise vicious historical figure as a lonely, troubled man who fell in love with somebody who could not love him.
“It’s frightening finding out how close to the average person Hinckley Jr. was,” Baldwin said.
Much of the music presents the assassins’ problems in a lighthearted manner, such as Hinckley Jr.’s song “Unworthy of Your Love,” in which he describes how inferior he is to Foster.
Katheryne Penny, a third-year musical theater student who plays then-President Gerald Ford’s attempted assassin Sara Jane Moore, said finding the truth about her character required intense research.
“She’s not very well known so I had to watch a lot of YouTube videos and read her biography to prepare for this character,” Penny said.
Penny said Moore pines for acceptance from everyone, leading her to seek high-profile jobs with the FBI. She said this is communicated to the audience in a darkly comedic scene in which Moore brings would-be assassin Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme a bucket of fried chicken. Fromme says it tastes like plastic and Moore enthusiastically agrees in order to please her.
Faber said the background stories of these assassins display that what led them to attempt high-profile murders was their disillusionment with American ideals.
“The American dream says there is nothing you can’t do, yet we are constrained by mental illness and our socioeconomic class,” Faber said. “These people are a product of our culture.”
Faber said “Assassins” brings these issues to the forefront to change the way we look at these infamous historical figures.
“It’s easy for us to dismiss people who engage in violence,” Faber said. “Even though the act is extreme, it’s still important to consider how they got there and how society may have oppressed them.”