THE WASHINGTON POST.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2019EZ18
Sam Ludwig
(as Lee Harvey Oswald)
Ludwig pulls double duty in “Assas-
sins” as the show’s narrator, the Ballad-
eer, and as Oswald. The actor says he
was surprised to learn he shared cer-
tain political views with the man who
killed John F. Kennedy in 1963 — albeit,
of course, on a much less radical scale.
“He is obviously presented [with] a
humanist portrayal in this show,” Lud-
wig says. “But even just thinking about
him in the larger geopolitical context, I
find him very easy to empathize with.”
Although the show opens at a
fairground shooting gallery as the
assassins — who also include Leon
Czolgosz (Lawrence Redmond),
Samuel Byck (Christopher Bloch)
and John Hinckley Jr. (Evan Casey)
— are handed their firearms, Oswald
is nowhere to be found. When the
character finally does make his en-
trance, “Assassins” uses his story to
comment on the corruption of the
American Dream with the sobering
number “Something Just Broke.”
“The show is always trying to high-
light something rotten at the core of
certain American values,” Ludwig
says. “Sometimes it gets presented as
the assassins are twisting them, and
sometimes it’s more like, ‘Well, maybe
the whole thing is a little bit question-
able.’”
[email protected]Tracy Lynn Olivera
(as Sara Jane Moore)
In September 1975, 17 days after
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (played in
this production by Rachel Zampelli)
was thwarted by Secret Service agents
as she aimed a pistol at Gerald Ford,
Moore launched an assassination at-
tempt of her own — missing Ford with
a revolver from 40 feet away.
“Even in, like, AP history, you don’t
learn about the woman that shot at
Gerald Ford and missed,” Olivera
says. “Literally nobody cares.”
Moore is now 89 and was released
from prison in 2007. That gave Olivera
an unusual resource: actual footage of
her character. As Olivera watched
interviews with Moore from the past
decade, she was struck by how the
would-be assassin came across as
“down-to-earth and really not batty at
all” — in sharp contrast to her frantic
portrayal onstage.
“I have to go with what the text
says,” Olivera says. “But knowing
what I know about her has made it a
little bit tricky for me. Does she de-
serve anything from us? No. But she is
a person that’s still alive, so I feel 1
percent obligated to honor the person
that she actually is.”Ian McEuen
(as Giuseppe Zangara)
Zangara has a uniquely tragic
backstory: The 5-foot-1 Italian immi-
grant suffered from chronic abdomi-
nal pains, which he said started
when his father forced him into
manual labor as a child. In 1933,
Zangara channeled his misery into a
frenzied attempt to shoot then-Pres-
ident-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt —
but instead struck five bystanders,
including Chicago Mayor Anton Cer-
mak, who died a few weeks later.
“I have not experienced searing fire
in my stomach from the age of 6,”
McEuen says. “So I really had to try
and find things in my life or the world
today that I could sort of place in my
mind as substitutions for the things
that [Zangara] went through.”
Specifically, McEuen draws on a
personal ordeal from 2014, when he
found himself coping with constant
pain due to torn cartilage in his hips.
A year passed before the condition
was diagnosed and surgically re-
paired.
“I was a different person back
then,” McEuen says. “It didn’t drive
me crazy, and I didn’t try to kill a
president, but... I could use that to
inhabit this person who is so very
different from me.”Bobby Smith
(as Charles J. Guiteau)
If Booth forever etched his name
into the American consciousness, it’s
with a fitting sense of irony that the
needy writer Guiteau — the man who
fatally shot James Garfield at a D.C.
train station in 1881 — has seemingly
seen his legacy erased.
“I don’t think anybody knows who
Charles Guiteau is, which is great, and
I didn’t either,” Smith says. “I went
down the rabbit hole, whether it was
helpful or not.”
The first thing Smith learned: Gui-
teau had so little luck romantically
during his five-plus years living at the
Oneida Community, a New York reli-
gious commune that practiced group
marriage, that the women there nick-
named him “Charles Git-out.” While
Smith says he first honors the script,
having a broader understanding of
Guiteau’s eccentric persona helps him
deliver a more grounded perform-
ance.
“ ‘Crazy’ is such a strange buzzword
these days, and you can’t play that as
an objective anyway,” Smith says.
“The idea of the authenticity, of what
you get from reading about [the real-
life person], marries into the text. It’s
fun. It’s hard, but fun.”ASSASSINS FROM 16COURTESY OF VINCENT KEMPSKYVincent Kempski says he found a lot of nuance in the
backstory of John Wilkes Booth, who shot President
Abraham Lincoln.COURTESY OF BOBBY SMITHBobby Smith says he “went down a rabbit hole” in
learning about Charles Guiteau, who shot President
James Garfield.COURTESY OF TRACY LYNN OLIVERATracy Lynn Olivera watched interviews of Sara Jane
Moore, who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford
in 1975.On Stage