Site Presented By
Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
The writer, director and actors of the hilarious New York play "I'm Going to Kill the President" are all anonymous, and getting in is like taking an espionage assignment in East Berlin.
Oct 29, 2003 | The writer, director and costar of one of the most amusing plays currently running in New York doesn't want his name published. The address of the theater where his show is running is a secret, too. To get there, you must stand on a street corner in DUMBO, a rapidly gentrifying industrial neighborhood in downtown Brooklyn, and wait for an operative to tell you which way to walk. Soon, you'll be intercepted by another agent, who will jog you down the street and quickly usher you into a nondescript doorway, telling you to take the elevator to the 10th floor.
At 8 p.m., once everyone has been shown in, a man in a suit, a ski mask and a comic German accent welcomes you to "I'm Going to Kill the President," a madcap farce about terrorism and apathy in John Ashcroft's America whose performance may or may not be a federal offense.
That legal ambiguity is part of what makes "I'm Going to Kill the President" so interesting. Under U.S. law, threatening the president is punishable by five years in prison. Even prank threats are seriously investigated.
Stephen Wermiel, a professor of constitutional law at American University in Washington, D.C., once found himself on the receiving end of such an investigation. He was an undergraduate student at Tufts University when President Richard Nixon announced the escalation of the bombing of Cambodia. Wermiel and five friends decided to call the White House, bluff their way through to the highest-level person they could get on the line, and deliver a message. They managed to get Nixon's communications director on the phone, and they told him, "Fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity." Five minutes later, the Secret Service called, and told Wermiel and his friends that they were being investigated.
Nothing ever came of the investigation, and Wermiel says that, similarly, it's unlikely that the author of "I'm Going to Kill the President" and his collaborators would be prosecuted for their play. Even if they were, he says, a conviction probably wouldn't survive a legal challenge. "The government has power to protect the president and other people against true threats, and this clearly is not a true threat," he says. "It's artistic license."
Still, he adds, "I can't say that nobody's going to try to threaten these people. In this day and age, with the Homeland Security Office and Attorney General Ashcroft's vigilance, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the people involved in this play get some grief." It's also likely, he says, that some federal security office has a file on the play and the people in it.
Because the limits of free speech and the prevalence of surveillance in PATRIOT Act America are so uncertain, its unclear how much the cloak-and-dagger stuff surrounding the show is a theatrical gimmick and how much is genuine precaution, a confusion the play's creator, whose nom de guerre is Hieronymous BANG, delights in exploiting.
Some of the audience obviously take it very seriously. On my way to the opening-night performance, an operative told me to follow a couple who'd already been given directions to the next rendezvous point. Turning a corner, I saw them speak to a woman with a cellphone and then walk quickly down the street. Running after them, I asked the man, who was middle-aged and wore his long, dark hair in a ponytail, where she'd told him to go.
"Why," he barked, "are you a narc?"
No, I told him, I'd been told to follow them.
"Follow us? For how long? We're just going for a walk," he said.
"Aren't you here for the play?" I asked.
"That depends," he said.
Not sure if he really was a paranoid asshole or was just playing one, I looked at him quizzically. "Don't give me that pouty face," he said.
He turned out to be a regular audience member, not a plant. But the vertiginous feeling I had speaking with him resurfaced several times in the course of "I'm Going to Kill the President," which aims to leave the audience unsure of just how risky the whole project really is. It's a kind of Rorschach test, measuring the degree to which people now feel themselves being watched. The show's comedy is loose and often goofy, but the construction of the whole experience, which begins the moment you arrive on the street corner, is enormously clever and asks crucial questions about just what country we've found ourselves in.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
