Stephen Sondheim: "Assassins"

Sondheim built his career on empathy for monsters and outcasts. The idea recurs again and again--in Sondheim's depiction of Rose, the Witch, Sweeney, Mrs. Lovett, Fosca, Georges's Mother, the discarded opera about Norma Desmond. These aren't heroic figures. My sense is that--in stretching himself to get inside the heads of these problematic figures--Sondheim is really wrestling with the ghost of his own problematic mother. (And he would reject such a facile and Freudian line of argument.)

"Assassins"--which Sondheim says is his most perfect musical--is a sort of climax for the freaks-at-center-stage story. "In case you missed what I was doing with Sweeney, I'm going to write a show for *twelve* Sweeneys. It will be one Sweeney after another. There will be no sweet Johannas. Because: why not?"

It's easy to overlook "Unworthy of Your Love." The joke is maybe stretched thin. But I actually don't think Sondheim is mocking his two speakers in his song. I think he really wants to meld his mind and heart with the people he's writing about, and the effect is haunting. John Hinckley sings to Jodie Foster: He will win her love by assassinating Ronald Reagan (he believes). Meanwhile, Squeaky Fromme addresses Charles Manson: She will win his love by killing Gerald Ford. The two sing in the style of a pop love ballad from the seventies or eighties: It's jarring, and funny, to see their addled brains appropriating the treacly cords from something you'd hear on a John Denver tape. Another joke is that this kind of love ballad would generally be a duet--the two speakers would address each other--but, in Sondheim's world, that's not what we're dealing with. Hinckley is locked in his own world; Fromme is locked in hers. They don't realize they aren't alone on the stage, even as they sing together. That's poignant. If they could turn eighty degrees, and make an actual human connection--then, maybe, the Reagan/Ford nonsense wouldn't need to occur.

"Less is more," says Sondheim, and you can see the stripped-down aesthetic at work here. Sondheim is channeling DuBose Heyward: "Bess, you is my woman now. You is. You is." Repetition of single names suggests obsession, as it does, also, in "Maria" and "Johanna." "You are wind and water and sky, Jodie. Tell me, Jodie...Jodie, Jodie..." "I am unworthy of your love, Charlie, darlin'..."

Twinned neediness: The two speakers implore their gods to give direction. "Tell me how I can earn your love." They devise grandiose scenarios: "I would come take you from your life, your cell...You would be queen to me, not wife...I would crawl belly-deep through hell...Baby, I'd die for you..." Sondheim's songs are often one-act plays, and in the final moments of this one, we see a pivot. "I'll find a way to earn your love, wait and see: Then you will turn your love to me." In the orgasmic last line, the lovers are united; the quest is over; life has meaning, because Jodie Foster and Charles Manson have made themselves available, in the flesh.

Sondheim says he views his work as an actor's work: He has to get inside the skin of the character, or why would he write the song? It's possible, in tackling Hinckley, Sondheim was thinking of his childhood self, and of the need he felt around his remote, icy mother. Who's to say? But, anyway, we all can relate to yearning. And so we can relate to freaks and monsters. A late-career insight from the Sondheim playbook.

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Liars and Saints

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