A provacateur takes aim

During previews of “Assassins,” the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical that opens at Studio 54 on Thursday, a tearful middle-age woman angrily walked out, venting at the house manager, “Clearly you’ve never had anyone in your family that’s been shot before.”

Well, most people haven’t. But if emotions are raw at this show about presidential assassins, it may be because the nature of the crime is like a death in the family. That the murders of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are expressed through Sondheim’s Americana pastiche songs makes “Assassins” all the more unsettling. It’s like a “death notice in the form of a singing telegram,” New York Times critic David Richards memorably wrote when the show premiered off-Broadway in 1991 to mixed notices.

“Half of the people are loving it and there are people who are so furious that they can’t get out of their seats at the end,” says Joe Mantello, director of this revival, which was postponed from a fall 2001 opening in the aftermath of Sept. 11. No one then was much in the mood for a musical about people taking potshots at the commander in chief. Not that anyone may be so now.

“I love the fact that it doesn’t take any prisoners,” Mantello says, “I’m not worried about being too provocative. I’m not afraid of confrontation.”

Indeed, alienation, anger and provocation are dominant themes in the eclectic career of this 41-year-old director. After all, this is the guy who staged Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi,” the earnest 1998 drama that sought to tell the Christ story through a gay prism and in the process incited death threats and mass protests outside the theater.

While Mantello’s resume has also included light comedy (“Design for Living”), domestic drama (“Three Hotels”) and epic musicals (“Wicked”), he is arguably at his most effective when tapping into the darker currents of the human condition.

“Several directors had approached me and Steve with the idea of doing the show in New York over the years,” Weidman says, “but Joe’s choices about casting and tone were more off center, darker and quirkier. We felt they were right on the nose; he understood these characters.”

Since his breakthrough production of “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” which revolved around a group of gay men finding refuge and conflict in a weekend country house, Mantello has often chosen works that seek to understand the outsider and the frustration and rage that status engenders. These include the embattled women of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” the malcontents of Neil LaBute’s “bash,” the emotionally scarred hash-slingers of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and the explosive killer in “Dead Man Walking,” the opera by McNally and Jake Heggie. Even Darren Lemming, that paragon in Richard Greenberg’s baseball romance, “Take Me Out,” cannot escape ostracism when he comes out of the closet; and the vengeful Elphaba, the Witch of the West in “Wicked” is perhaps the ultimate misunderstood Other.

But with “Assassins,” Mantello faces his most daunting challenge.

“I think anger can be a very useful tool,” he says. “The first thing I said to the casting director was that I wanted actors who were in touch with a kind of real, terrifying anger. Not horrible people who were miserable, but people like Mario [Cantone] and Denis [O’Hare], who have ready access to the darker sides of themselves.”

O’Hare plays Charles Guiteau, who killed James Garfield, while Cantone plays Sam Byck, the would-be assassin of Richard Nixon who planned to fly a 747 into the White House (sound familiar?). Their fellowship includes seven others, who in a carnival setting, take turns shooting their way into history, flanked on one side by their pioneer, John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris), and on the other by their redeemer Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris).

Collectively, they lurk in the shadows of set designer Robert Brill’s roller-coaster support beams, enviously eyeing the sideshow prizes just beyond reach (including a Jodie Foster doll for John Hinckley) and hoping for the immortality of Brutus.

At one point in the show, Booth exhorts Oswald with a line from another play about the American Dream: “Attention must be paid.” The discomfiture of the audiences at Studio 54, however, may stem from just that. For “Assassins” seems to beg attention for a group of miscreants that the public would just as soon forget.

“I think, as written, ‘Assassins’ simply acknowledges the very human need to be acknowledged,” Mantello says. “As director, I’ve got to put aside any particular biases or prejudices that, as a moral human being, this is not an appropriate or acceptable way to get what you want.”

As successful as he is, Mantello is no stranger to the alienation and anger of the many characters he’s put on stage. “What makes Joe an outsider is that he is always on uncertain ground,” says Jon Robin Baitz, the playwright who for 12 years was his domestic partner before they parted amicably in 2002. “For as long as I’ve known him, he’s never taken anything at face value. Even when he’s comfortable, his gratitude at being comfortable only serves to accentuate how much of an outsider he is.”

Running the gamut

That conundrum of confidence and insecurity, certitude and ambiguity, bravery and fear, is apparent in the course of a leisurely interview on a recent afternoon in his airy, modestly appointed Tribeca loft. The director appears happy and thoughtful, often taking long pauses before answering a question, large mournful eyes occasionally lit by a lopsided grin. As direct and honest as Mantello is, however, he remains somewhat elusive. Warns Baitz, “He’s an Italian American sphinx in a sandstorm, with the occasional Mona Lisa smile.”

On a shelf is the Tony he won for “Take Me Out,” an award for which he’d been nominated twice before, for directing “Love! Valour!” and for his performance as the tortured Louis in “Angels in America.” He’d scored what he considers the apogee of any actor’s career 12 years after coming to New York from Rockford, Ill., having grown up as the oldest of three sons in a middle-class family that encouraged his creativity. After a stint at the Carolina Schools of the Arts, he moved in 1984 to New York, where he joined fellow classmates Peter Hedges and Mary-Louise Parker in forming the Edge, an off-off-Broadway company. They’re all still close. .

Parker says that while Mantello can be deep and provocative, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. “Joe has absolutely no vanity about appreciating and loving things that other people might find banal or silly,” Parker says. “I remember afternoons of watching ‘Judge Judy’ with him, eating M & Ms and smoking cigarettes.”

His directing career began at Circle Rep and Naked Angels, where he met Baitz in 1989. The two embarked on a concurrent climb as two of the theater’s most promising talents, though their careers, by design, rarely intersected. On the opening night of “Wicked,” Baitz gave his friend a statuette of a monkey that sits on a sill next to the only sinister touch in the cheerful apartment: a rubber mask of one of the musical’s flying monkeys. “It reminded me of some of his high jinks,” Baitz says. Mantello’s humor, adds Baitz, can range from “that of a hyperactive 8-year-old with attention deficit disorder to an exhausted Borscht Belt has-been.”

That also explains the career eclecticism, his refusal to be pigeonholed. “I don’t have a style,” Mantello has said repeatedly, “I have a sensibility.”

A key to that sensibility lies in the profession Mantello says he would have taken up had he not become a director: painting. Sitting in front of a male nude watercolor by artist friend Eric Fischl, Mantello says that almost all of his productions begin with a visual hook. He took one of his cues for “Assassins” from Weidman’s never-produced film script of the musical, which opens at a Norman Rockwell-like fair, then trails an assassin to an isolated shooting gallery on the outskirts, giving the impression of people who can’t get into the party.

His inspiration for “Wicked,” he says, were the somewhat grotesque woodcuts that accompanied Gregory Maguire’s novel on which the show is based. “The tone could have gone very Disney or whimsical, but I wanted to bring out some of the skewed elements of the story,” Mantello says of the sympathetic treatment of the Wicked Witch and the jaundiced skepticism of Glinda, the Good Witch.

“Joe draws in very broad theatrical strokes,” says producer Marc Platt. “We were trying to resolve a problem, how best to end the first act in which Elphaba begins to fly. He didn’t want her to fly around the stage on a broom. We were at a restaurant that had paper tablecloths, and Joe just started sketching out what is now in the show. Then he just gets out of the way so the emotional moment can get the focus and not the gimmickry.”

In fact, the big-budget extravagance of “Wicked” as well as the romantic sentiments are something of an anomaly for Mantello. He’s more at home in spare surroundings, both physically and emotionally.

“ ‘Astringent’ is a good word for Joe,” says McNally, a frequent collaborator. “He’s poetic and austere, a bit of a minimalist. I think sometimes Joe’s work is so good that it doesn’t get noticed.”

Like many playwrights with whom he’s worked, Mantello is socially aware, though the political game itself bores him. David Stone, who produced “Vagina Monologues,” says that whenever he and the playwright talked about electoral politics, Mantello’s eyes would glaze over. He recalls that when Ensler first began performing “Monologues,” she insisted on wearing clunky boots. At one point, Mantello casually asked Ensler to take them off and continue the piece barefoot. “It was liberating,” Stone says. “It made Eve take herself less seriously as a political feminist artist; it made her more of a storyteller.”

Mercurial moments

Most his collaborators point to Mantello’s subtle and methodical way of working, though his silence can be unnerving at times. That’s not to say his beliefs are not deeply and passionately held. By his own admission, Mantello has a hotheaded stubbornness he ascribes to his southern Italian roots -- a trait that sometimes gets the better of him. “I’m working on it,” he says.

“There’s a lot of anger in Joe,” says Stone, who hit a vesuvian font of it when the two worked on “The Santaland Diaries.” “It’s scary when it happens and then it’ll just disappear.”

“Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz also discovered that aspect of Mantello in the tense months before the musical opened on Broadway. The collaboration was tense, a clash of personalities that led to battles. The director found the relationship debilitating. “The actual butting of heads led to a fruitful ending,” says Mantello, conceding he was as culpable as Schwartz. “But I’m not a great believer that it has to be that fraught for it to be creative.”

Schwartz, on the other hand, says Mantello’s combative spirit was one reason he chose him. “I know I would’ve run roughshod over other directors and Joe would stand and fight for what he believed in. The fights were never over tone and vision -- that we were united on -- but over some of the smaller details. On the most difficult day, I didn’t have a second of regret.”

At this point, Mantello doesn’t repay the compliment. Though “Wicked” could turn out to be the most commercially successful show of his career (it’s grossing more than a million dollars a week), the director says he probably wouldn’t have taken the job if he’d known the experience would be so unpleasant. That’s a quality-of-life decision that has come in the aftermath of Sept. 11. “You have to choose to be happy, you have to work at it,” he says, “because I don’t think there is such a thing anymore as getting home safely.”

He laughs ruefully, bringing to mind Baitz’s description of him as a having “the sensitivity of a frightened little boy.” And indeed, he does say he’s nervous when he takes the subway. He allays his fears by sketching into notebooks. In one, there are solitary figures, including a line drawing of one woman, isolated, lost in thought. “They’re not meant to do anything,” he says. “But if I can connect to another person, to the line of another person, it makes getting to my destination that much easier.”