Word: guiteau
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Each successive scene tells the story of another assassin in a similar way. The assassins' stories are fictitiously intertwined: Charles Guiteau, who eventually assassinated James Garfield; Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley; Guiseppe Zangara, who attempted to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt; would-be Gerald Ford assassins Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore; Sam Byck, who plotted to kill Nixon; and John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan. The time gap separating each of the assassinations (or attempted assassinations) is given no heed: placing these disparate events side by side allows them to interact in a kind of fantastic sphere that...
...Guiteau (Joseph Nuccio '00) is a sleazy, wheeling-dealing character out to promote his book and acquire the ambassadorship to France, complete to the shiny suit and slicked-back hair. He constantly encourages Leon Czologsz (Rodrigo Chazaro '99), a disgruntled immigrant whose complaints parody the labor movement of the first half of the century. The scenes featuring these two are frequently juxtaposed with those involving Sam Byck (Kenneth Weber), a man obsessed with the right to protest...
...Debra Monk's stunning evocation is all matronly giggles and chilling folksiness. In other ably written scenes, Victor Garber brings condescending grandeur to Booth, Terrence Mann finds earnest simplicity in Czolgosz, Greg Germann gives a dorky sweetness to Hinckley, and Jonathan Hadary evokes hysterical egomania in Charles Guiteau, killer of James Garfield...
...challenged, and humiliated established figures of authority. In Washington D.C., he broke out of the "escape-proof" cell that once held Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield. In London, he freed himself from a pair of "pick-proof" darbies, the handcuffs used by Scotland Yard. And then, during a European tour, he freed himself from the thumbscrews, elbow irons and chains of the Kaiser's Polizei, and escaped from one of the "carrettes" the Russian Tsar used to transport his prisoners to Siberia. Such feats were always met by the surprise, and frequent embarrassment...
...three killers were very likely insane. None had a criminal past. But the national passions aroused by their crimes seem, in retrospect, a chilling echo of the assassinations themselves. Guiteau went raving to the scaffold, where a crowd that had paid as much as $300 each for the pleasure of seeing him hang heard him cry, Glory, glory, glory," as the door was sprung from beneath his feet. Czolgosz was electrocuted only 46 days after McKinley died, and a carboy of sulphuric acid was poured into his coffin afterward, by way of post-mortem punishment. Sergeant Boston Corbett, the soldier...