What if a group of people connected by just one common fact were put together on stage and allowed to interact as they never did in real life? That's the playful what-if that animates both "Assassins" and "Travesties". The two results are wildly different fantasias on this shared premise. In the productions currently at two Western Massachusetts summer theaters, the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Berkshire Theatre Festival, in Stockbridge, both are hugely entertaining.
The tie that binds the nine principals in Stephen Sondheim's musical "Assassins" is that they all shot -- or at least shot at -- a president of the United States. The connecting thread in Tom Stoppard's play "Travesties" is both more solid and more tenuous. It's based on the fact that in 1917, at the height of World War I, the Irish novelist James Joyce, the Roumanian founder of the Dada art movement, Tristan Tzara, and the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin were all living in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland. It also draws on -- or rather, mercilessly exploits -- the fact that in that year, Joyce directed a production of the quintessential English drawing-room comedy, "The Importance of Being Earnest".
Stoppard's play is a series of travesties on those two mildly intriguing sets of facts. It's narrated by another real-life figure, Henry Carr, an officer in the British consulate, who acted in Joyce's production. Carr is recalling the story as a doddery old man, and in his leaky memory those long-ago events get scattered and confused, like the nonsense poems Tzara created by cutting up newspaper pages then pulling the words randomly out of a hat. His memoir becomes a hilarious motley of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, Tzara's whimsical nonsensicality, and Lenin's revolutionary rants, all framed in a surreal paraphrase of Oscar Wilde's play.
Gregory Boyd's production rides high on Stoppard's flood of wordplay. His actors attack their giddy roles with abandon, and most of the highjinks work fine. David Garrison is wonderfully snooty as Carr in his younger days, though it's a puzzle why the elder version of this dignified dandy looks like a tramp emerging from one of Samuel Beckett's trash cans. Stephen Spinella gives Joyce an antic charm and an amusingly terrible Irish accent. and Michael Stuhlbarg's Tzara neatly fits the aesthetic bomb-thrower into the mannered cadences of Oscar Wilde.
Lynn Collins and Kali Rocha complete the Wildean circle as Gwendolyn and Cecily -- disciples of Joyce and Lenin, respectively, but named after the two ingenues in "Earnest". Building on the linguistic excesses of the script, the director has given them a pie-throwing cat fight and a couple of breast-baring scenes that are as funny as they are gratuitous.
All three historical figures in "Travesties" are revolutionaries, each of them destined to have a profound influence in his chosen sphere. In 1917, Lenin was heading for Russia to overthrow the capitalist order, Joyce was writing "Ulysses", the novel that would revolutionize 20th-century literature, and Tzara was overturning conventional definitions of art and paving the way for surrealism.
In contrast to these world-shakers, the nine assassins in Sondheim's musical merely think that shooting the president will change the world and make them immortal. From John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln partly out of Confederate fervor and partly because his acting career was on the rocks, to John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan to get Jody Foster's attention, these gun-toting losers see themselves as men -- and in two cases women -- with a mission. Their violent acts are aimed at avenging societal wrongs and personal affronts. They are people for whom the American Dream turned out to be a nightmare, and who think a magic bullet will finally make it come true.
Timothy Douglas's production, in the intimate Unicorn Theatre, imagines a gun shop where the dissatisfied and downtrodden gather to pick up their pistols. In a series of songs and vignettes, we see the frustrations and defeats, the dreams and delusions that feed their fantasies of righteous violence. For most of them, there's a pathetic need to be recognized or to act out an obsession. Charles Guiteau, a failed author, wants to be an ambassador and shoots James A. Garfield when his application is denied. Lee Harvey Oswald, suicidal over the failure of his marriage and his life, decides to shoot John Kennedy instead of himself. Sam Byck, an unemployed Santa Claus, is enraged that his letters to celebrities go unanswered, so he decides to kill Richard Nixon (chillingly, his unsuccessful plot involved hijacking a plane and flying it into the White House).
For some of these assassins, squeezing the trigger is political as well as personal. When Leon Czolgosz takes aim at William McKinley, he's acting for all the oppressed slaves of capitalist industry. Giuseppe Zangara's poverty and bad luck have given him ulcers, and it's that pain more than social outrage that drives him to fire at Franklin Roosevelt's motorcade.
Charles Manson's sometime girlfriend, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and Sara Jane Moore, a bored neurotic housewife, both tried to kill Gerald Ford (of all people), on separate occasions. Here, the librettist, John Weidman, brings them together in a mutual plot that is planned and executed in a series of Chaplinesque misadventures.
Some of the musical score, played by pianist Ken Clark, is pure Sondheim. But most of the songs are composed in styles of the period they reflect. The story of John Wilkes Booth is told by a banjo-playing balladeer. Charles Guiteau's song from the gallows is a 19th-century hymn. And John Hinckley and Squeaky Fromme sing to their respective fantasy lovers in a sappy '70s pop duet a la the Carpenters.
The Unicorn production sustains a macabre liveliness that keeps the gristly theme and its unsavory characters entertaining without trivializing them. The 15 cast members may look too youthful for some of their roles but they perform with polished skill. "Assassins" was a bit of a flop in its New York debut, but this revival consistently hits the target.