Assassins

Stephen Sondheim sure has a thing for sore losers. Sweeney Todd was a standup guy — and tidy, too — compared to the loose cannons featured in Assassins. This is a rogues’ gallery of aspiring President-slayers, four successful and five mere wannabes.

The difficulties that this odd musical has had in laying claim to major stage space — it ran briefly at New York’s Playwrights Horizon in 1990-91, pre-Gulf War, then missed out on a planned Roundabout Theatre revival post-9/11 — can’t be attributed to bad timing alone. With a book by John Weidman, Assassins is a perverse little exercise in Brechtian alienation. Not only does it constantly underscore its own theatricality with a pastiche of sarcastic musical hommages ranging from spirituals and Sousa to syrupy ur-folk, it also conscientiously eschews any kind of implicit moral compass, leaving the viewer to settle in, uncomfortably, somewhere between revulsion and compassion.

The sole voice of reason belongs to a banjo-plucking Balladeer, weakly rendered in the current Berkshire Theatre Festival production by Joe Jung, one of several University of Connecticut MFA candidates participating in the festival’s summer training program. The bandanna’d minstrel, a cross between Earl Scruggs and Bruce Springsteen, derides and needles the unhinged, self-styled heroes, who in turn mingle in odd combinations across time and egg each other on. The Balladeer has a big job (it’s nine against one!) in attempting to maintain the thread of a rational authorial voice. As viewers, we desperately want him to establish that these people are way out there — bad to the core or, at best, crazy. Ultimately, as presented in this somewhat softened version of the piece conceived by director Timothy Douglas (associate director for the Actors Theatre of Louisville), they’re a bit of both: evil, mad, and also laugh-out-loud funny, and touching. Really, they’re not that different from the rest of us, with our rankling grievances and intermittent yearnings for fame at all costs.

Call it the Brutus principle — an argument employed effectively by John Wilkes Booth (Michael Baker, a powerful singer and commanding actor) in trying to convince Lee Harvey Oswald (Jung again, resurrected and re-embodied at play’s end) to point his weapon out of the Dallas Book Depository window rather than at his own sorry head. At this point, hilarity flees and the party ends on a very sad note indeed: the widely published image of not-quite-three-year-old John-John Kennedy saluting his fallen father.

But what fun it has been, watching these wackos connive! Manson love-slave Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (played in dead-on deadpan by Jill Michael), whose every other phrase begins with “Charlie says,” takes it upon herself to teach housewife-turned-FBI agent Sara Jane Moore (Megan Ofsowitz in a wonderfully ditsy, Gracie Allenesque turn) how to shoot; they use the Kentucky Fried Colonel, in bucket form, for target practice. (The two women never actually met, though they went after Gerald Ford only a few weeks apart.) Squeaky also acts as fictional mentor to defensive doofus John Hinckley, nicely underplayed by Eric Loscheider, in the torch duet “Unworthy of Your Love.”

Juilliard student Aric Martin slickly embodies glad-handing, all-American optimism as preacher-author-entrepreneur Charles Guiteau, who shot James Garfield for failing to award him — a perfect stranger — the ambassadorship to France. And Kasey Mahaffy all but steals the show as lesser-known attacker Samuel Byck, who hijacked a plane in the hope of ramming it into Richard Nixon’s White House. His vitriol as a going-nowhere, pro-tem Santa in a mangy suit is the funniest riff in the show.

Make that funny-sobering. This is really unsavory stuff overall, a prolonged, sick joke. It’s also brilliant, a subversive attempt to ferret out the loopholes and loonies that riddle the American Dream. You don’t have to wait to see Assassins make it big on Broadway, should it ever get that far; it’s hard to imagine a better incarnation than this one, vividly brought to life by stars-in-the-making.