mary-masked
Assassins Write Up
Published: July 18th 2017, 6:00:02 pm
I meant to do a write up of the weekend and it turned into a review of Assassins. Oops.
It started with seeing Assassins, which was only playing for a week. It was supposed to be a staged reading but they were only on book for the last few scenes and otherwise it was fully staged and utterly beautiful. It was a courageous and, I think, important musical to stage right now. Sure, the trump-Julius Caesar got all the attention but, to be totally honest, I don't think it's making much of a statement to have Julius Caesar look like Trump. It's hardly a new idea to use that play to make some kind of statement about the current president. And, in the play, killing him is not really considered a particularly good idea so the furor over it was pretty damn misplaced.
Assassins, on the other hand, is about people using big, flashy, politicized, violence to get the attention they feel they're entitled to. No one had to reference Trump to get that point across. The only nod to Trump was a meaningful pause the balladeer made after singing "Every now and then the country goes a little wrong. Every now and then a madman's bound to come along." And so it became cathartic and escapist at once. It was nice to experience art that talked about and poked around a problem particular to the US, without screaming about it.
That said, I was disappointing when the child with the gun came out at the end and his gun went off by accident. That seemed...naive to me. I know that there are tons of accidents in our country involving children and firearms but, it's 2017. School shootings stopped being shocking, like, 15 years ago. If that kid's not carrying an assault rifle and aiming it directly into the crowd, what are we even doing?
In that vein, what really *got* me about the show was just how jaded our country is right now. I cried during the JFK sequence because I was trying so hard to imagine a life so innocent and wholesome that the president being killed could have THAT much of an impact on everyone in the nation. I'm not going to say I wasn't shocked or horrified or traumatized when 9/11 happened a mile away from me when I was 18. But people talk about JFK getting shot like it was the first time they'd ever learned about the existence of evil. By then I'd already lived through columbine and an election being stolen. I did not feel safe. Nor did I think our government was untouchable.
I'm so envious of people who got to live in a world where a president being shot could have THAT much of an effect on the cultural consciousness. Even at his most beloved, people kind of expected Obama to be assassinated (which may be an echo of JFK's effect on our consciousness, or just a recognition of the danger all black men live in, or both.) People are *still* making art about JFK's assassination. I doubt a Trump assassination would get more than a couple weeks of coverage.