Review: The Beautiful Land I Seek, the Story of Harry Truman’s Would-Be Assassins

Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola are not in the presidential assassin hall of fame. Unsuccessful in their attempt to murder Harry S. Truman on November 1, 1950, while the president was staying at Blair House during a White House renovation, the Puerto Rican nationalists are not even in Sondheim’s musical. I had never heard of them until I saw Matthew Barbot’s hallucinogenic history play The Beautiful Land I Seek (La Linda Tierra que Busco Yo), now making its world premiere in an excellent production by director José Zayas at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (the play is produced in collaboration with Latinx Playwrights Circle and Fault Line Theatre). But I’m unlikely to forget them now.

Barbot imagines the pair sequestered within a compartment on a train bound for Washington, DC. Griselio (Bobby Román) nervously tries to make conversation as the poker-faced Oscar (Alejandro Hernández) coolly combs his hair. Stealth is the key to any successful assassination, but they keep being interrupted by increasingly implausible interlopers (all played by the versatile swings Daniel Colón and Ashley Marie Ortiz) including fellow Puerto Rican freedom fighter Lolita Lebrón, ghoulish oncologist Cornelius P. Rhoads, and the president himself. We suspect that our protagonists aren’t actually on the Capitol Limited, but a kind of locomotive purgatory from which passengers cannot disembark — an apt metaphor for the Puerto Rican status quo.

Zayas deftly navigates the wild tonal shifts in Barbot’s script, sacrificing neither humor nor gravity in this grim farce. Hernández and Román provide a sturdy emotional center, never letting us forget the stakes of their doomed mission. While Román seems more boyish and impulsive, driven by the high ideals and surging testosterone of a young man, Hernández projects the cultivated calm of a resolute killer. The moment that façade breaks is the most memorable of the entire play.

The context of their actions, both past and present, comes from the supporting players. Ortiz has a thrilling turn as María from West Side Story, and one suspects that this isn’t the first time she’s uttered the phrase, “How many bullets are left, Chino?” Colón throws himself into every role with manic energy. His portrayal of Alexander Hamilton (à la Lin-Manuel Miranda) is particularly hilarious, although the Italian accent of his Christopher Columbus proves as elusive as the Indian subcontinent.

A fifth actor arrives late in the play claiming to be the playwright, and he does such a convincing job of filling the role with requisite nerdy awkwardness that I had to check the digital program after to confirm that it wasn’t actually Barbot onstage (the actor is Nate Betancourt).

Scenic designer Tristan Jeffers has constructed a realistic (if oversized) train compartment, a perfectly mundane canvas onto which Barbot and Zayas splatter their fantastical epic of Puerto Rico persisting through the suffocating embrace of empire. Lucrecia Briceño’s sneaky and decisive lighting facilitates the magic of the script, as do Eamonn Farrell’s projections, which appear like a vision-board collage tailored to each new character. Costume designer Haydee Zelideth impressively does double duty, delivering instantly recognizable costumes for the time-travelers and both authentic 1950s period costumes to bring us back to the actual event — now just a blip in an ever-increasing timeline of attempted presidential assassinations.

The Beautiful Land I Seek has auspiciously arrived off-Broadway at a time of popular acclaim for the assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While Collazo and Torresola attempted their grand political gesture at a time of relative social cohesion in a triumphal America, those conditions have evaporated in 2024, and an alarming number of Americans have come to view violence as a legitimate means to desired political ends. That makes this examination of the forces that drive assassins to kill particularly timely, with no sign that will change in the foreseeable future.