The Challenge of Performing "Assassins" After an Assassination Attempt on the Former President
3 Below Production of ‘Assassins’ (Photo: Dave Lepori Photography)
by Alex Kulak, Guest Editorial
On the afternoon of Saturday, July 13th, 2024, the latest chapter in American History found it’s subject matter.
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a campaign stop near Butler, Pennsylvania, is an aggregate of several cataclysms, causes, and casualties. On top of the immediate effects of the event itself, including the death of audience member Corey Comperatore, the critical injury of two other audience members, its effect on Trump’s national image and campaign, and its status as the point of criticality following a near-decade of intense political polarization, there is also its significance in wider history. This is the first legitimate assassination attempt on a current or former president since the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the first attempt on a presidential candidate’s life since George Wallace in 1972.
What’s most bizarre is that both of those assassination attempts have already been depicted and scrutinized (Reagan’s more fully, Wallace’s more incidentally) in a work of theatre.
In a musical, no less. And that musical was set to be performed in two theaters that very night.
When the news broke that former President Trump had been shot, Town and Country Players, a company in Buckingham, Pennsylvania (a mere 300 miles from Butler), was in the middle of vocal warm-ups. On the opposite side of the country, 3 Below Theaters in San Jose, California, was preparing for its cast to check in.
The show they would be performing? Assassins. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical revue exploring the motives and inner complexities of the seven men and two women behind the most famous acts of political violence in American History. (A third production set to open the following week will not be discussed in this article, as it is a student production with a majority-underage cast and crew.)
"A cast member held up their phone and said, ‘You’re not gonna believe this’, said Valerie Sharper, a Board Member at Town and Country who was working on the production as a light board operator. In a phone interview, Sharper spoke about the company’s frenetic response to the reports coming out of Butler. "We thought we should say something but decided against it as the news was not definite."
Town and Country ultimately went ahead with the performance. They had celebrated their opening night the day before, and the cast was ready to make the show go on. They declined to say anything to the assembled at that evening’s performance but would post a message to Facebook the following morning:
"…Assassins examines the complex and often difficult aspects of history. While we believe that theater and the arts can serve as a catalyst for important conversations and positive change, our theater and our production do not condone or promote political violence…"
Sharper is optimistic about going ahead with the next two weeks of performances. She says there’s never been a question of canceling performances, and in a twist, the notoriously polarizing and controversial musical might be a place of comfort for those in attendance. "I hope audiences come and look at it, and it helps them to understand what’s happening in our world a little better. It contributes to understanding the motivations of why someone would do an awful thing like this.
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In San Jose, however, 3 Below was blessed by the power of time zones with much more lead time to respond. While Town and Country was preparing for their second performance, 3 Below Theatre was preparing for their opening night. It was the end of a careful and mindful process, led by director Scott Guggenheim, who runs 3 Below with his wife, choreographer Shannon Guggenheim.
Scott and Shannon walked me through the myriad of artistic choices they made to ensure actor comfort while preserving the show’s original bite. The firearms in the show are nonfunctional, the gunfire is prerecorded sound design, a role normally played by a child actor would be played by an adult, and the barrels of the guns always stay pointed well away from the audience. "We did our homework and did our effort ahead of time. The thing we all want to know is why did he do it." ( "he" being Trump’s would-be assassin, whose motivations and political ideologies are still being disputed and scrutinized at the time of writing).
"The interesting thing is that is what we studied for weeks in rehearsals. What was the breaking point that led to that extreme? We live in a world that is very disenfranchised."
The decision was made to cancel the opening night performance. "I believe the show must go on, and nothing has changed. We still live in a world where people choose violence over dialogue. There was a big hesitance, but we had to take our actor’s fears into consideration. Many of our actors grew up with school shooter drills. That’s not something we dealt with at their age. The oldest person in the cast is 62, and the rest are 20-somethings, and they were the ones that felt the strongest about the fear of attack in the theatre."
This is not the first time this show has invited controversy in San Jose. In 1993, one of the first regional productions premiered at the now-closed San Jose Civic Light Opera. The show was fraught with audience walkouts, and noticeable patches of its 3000-seat auditorium were vacant after the intermission. "The actors who were in that show still have PTSD," said Scott.
Morale is high at 3 Below, and actors are going on with the show, their concerns put at ease. Bag checks have been put in place, and trust has been put in the process. As the director, Scott can’t help but think about the other ways this could have gone. "I believe that if Trump had actually been killed, our reaction would have been even more swift in solidarity or respect."
Much has been said about Assassins in the 34 years since its premiere, from being called one of Sondheim’s greatest works to being dismissed as overly cynical and polemic. However, you can’t say that the show gets close to condoning, let alone inspiring, political violence. If anything, it’s the opposite. The show’s penultimate number, "Something Just Broke", is a haunting lament from a nation as they grieve the loss of the one citizen thought to be untouchable.
"And I thought:
You know what?
There are presidents
Who aren’t worth a lot
There’s the kind that gets elected then forgot…
Still, something just broke."
As a result of Trump’s assassination attempt being the first of the Social Media Age, varied responses on both ends of the spectrum have been given a platform. Expectedly, some of those responses were within the level of vitriol Trump has spent the past eight years earning. We’ve already started to see the repercussions, from Home Depot employees to comedy rock band front men losing their jobs over a cavalier attitude to the near-murder of a former President. Minutes after the shooting, a now-deleted thread on BroadwayWorld speculated on what updates to the material Sondheim might make if he were alive.
There probably were Americans glad to read President Kennedy’s or President Garfield’s obituary, but they didn’t live in a time where they could broadcast that to every computer on Earth. It’s not a bad thing to think bad things, but posting it on X(formerly Twitter) might be. Nothing made it clearer to me in the minutes following the shooting how terrible political polarization had truly become.
Assassins is a show that tells us the presidency is, to some extent, irrelevant in an assassination. The presidents themselves occupy less than two minutes of total stage time. They may be the target, but we, the people, are the victims. The victims of endless gun violence, the victims of disenfranchisement, the victims of untreated mental illness, and the victims of economic instability. Booth and Czolgosz and Guiteau and the rest thought they were unseating a tyrant or earning their place in history, but what they did, and what Thomas Matthew Crooks did on July 13th, showed that "all you have to do is move your little finger, and you can change the world."
If only someone would change it for the better.