Review of Land of the Free – clever investigation of a presidential assassin | theater

‘WWhy did you do that, Johnny?” asks the Balladeer in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which forced John Wilkes Booth to share the spotlight with a host of other hunters. Now Abraham Lincoln’s murderer explains himself in detail in Land of the Free, a deft and imaginative new play from Simple8.

The ironies are a gift to every playwright. Lincoln and Booth were both theater fans: Booth was an actor from a family of actors, and the President had seen him perform at Ford’s Theater, where they had their fateful last meeting. But it’s the way director Sebastian Armesto and co-writer Dudley Hinton wrap, unwrap and re-wrap this gift that makes the material even better. Booth’s life is played out once in the first act, beginning with a childhood performance of Julius Caesar, and then revisited in the second with a shift in focus and a variety of theatrical forms: Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, the odd musical number.

This is a play that knows it is a play and says it. A makeshift proscenium arch forms a frame around the floor-level stage, while red velvet curtains separate the foreground of the action from the background. They move up and down to delineate scenes, giving the impression that the piece is constantly ending and beginning again. This alludes to the cyclical nature of political violence, a theme that is expressed again when we meet the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln. On both sides of the stage there are photographic memories of successful (John F. Kennedy) or unsuccessful (Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump) assassination attempts.

The seven-person company shares multiple roles, with the exception of the magnetic Brandon Bassir, who appropriately devotes his energy to the bloodthirsty Booth, a man who sees the deadly bullet as a “strike against the elite.” Bassir introduces another level of metatextual commentary that echoes Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle (who was an influence on Reagan’s would-be assassin) whenever Booth slips into smarmy promotional mode. Meanwhile, Clara Onyemere would make a compelling Lincoln, even without the irony of a black actress playing the role in a year when the US could have its first black female president.