"Killer Instinct"
Broadway.com
May 5, 2004
by Mary Catherine Garrison

About the author:
Mary Catherine Garrison is killing audiences nightly as would-be assassin and Manson protégé Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme in Assassins. Garrison made her Broadway debut in 2000 with The Man Who Came to Dinner. Her off-Broadway credits include The Last of the Thortons, Crimes of the Heart, Street Scene, The Prisoner's Song and Debbie Does Dallas. You also might recognize her from the films Moonlight Mile and How to Deal. Here, she shares her thoughts on the challenges of portraying a real, living person; her surprising correspondence with Squeaky herself; and how trying to do a "Charlize Theron in Monster" kind of performance doesn't quite work in this Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical.

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I've never played a character based on a real person who was still living. In fact, I've never even played a character based on a real person. I've based characters on real people, but they never found out about it. So, when Assassins came up, I was thrilled. It felt like a whole new challenge. I thought it would be really interesting from a character construction point of view. Usually, you start with the script, but the way a character walks, talks, eats, etc. is something you invent. In my experience, your instincts sort of lead you in the general direction from the beginning and after playing around with different vague ideas in rehearsals, hopefully you land on some basics that feel true and continue the never-ending process of specifying your choices, discovering new ones, or get fired. (Just kidding.) But with a real person--the way they move and talk is already established. My plan was to practice imitating Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme physically and vocally and eventually apply it to the scenes John Weidman had written. My intention was to be brutally accurate in my portrayal--as true of a portrait as I was capable of doing. I was very lofty about it all--I was going to be like Charlize Theron in Monster. This was serious.

About two months before rehearsals started, I started researching her. My starting point was to get a handle on the whole Charles Manson thing. I figured I had to understand what she loved about him--and what had happened in her life that could drive someone to devote their life to someone like him. The first thing I got my hands on was Helter Skelter--an obvious starting point. It read like a horror novel and basically just scared me. Not too helpful in terms of acting. Then I googled her and from there I found a biography written about her, books on other members of the family, CDs by Manson and the family, documentaries, and a website someone had created called www.squeakyfromme.org. I have to say I was surprised to find she was a cult figure--at least she was to this person who had lovingly devoted a website to her, her poetry/writings, her embroidery, etc. After reading her biography, I was beginning to see a little past the cultural myth that surrounds that whole group and see a real person, which was what I needed to do to play her. She was someone who never felt love from her father, who always felt different, who was very bright, very lonely, liked, sweet-natured and odd. Someone who was desperate to create the family she never had. I visited the website a lot and eventually found her address in prison. I initially wasn't going to write her. I thought it could be invasive, rude; I had no idea how it would affect her. After all, these are not the most flattering portraits of successful/would-be killers.

The first week of rehearsal, I wrote my first letter. I started off explaining myself and what I was doing and proceeded to ask her lots of questions--little things I couldn't find in my research--(Did you wear underwear? Did the girls get catty and fight? Did you really all sleep together?)--weeks went by and I still hadn't heard from her and just assumed she wasn't interested in helping me. (Why would she be?) I pretty much forgot about it. Ironically, some of us assassins in rehearsal were struggling with what can only be described as being "over-researched," meaning that what needed to be done to make the scene work conflicted with what we had found in our myriad of books/articles/websites. The famous "my character wouldn't do that!" line may have come up a time or two.... This was especially true for me. Squeaky Fromme--the character--while based on Lynette Fromme, is part of the comic relief in the play and needs to be funny before biographically accurate. I soon realized that I was not, in fact, Charlize Theron, and that my research was a perfect starting place, but I was not in a docudrama. My scenes were for the most part comedic--and my job was to be true to the play first. So, I used what I found in the research when it was appropriate, and I found other options when it wasn't.

Cut to the first week of tech, I check the mail and there it is: a homemade card with the return address of Lynette Fromme. She apologized for not getting back to me sooner, and explained answers to my questions were on their way. A few days later, an eight-page hand-written letter arrived. It was an odd feeling, to say the least. There was her handwriting--very pretty. There was my name in her handwriting. Over the next two weeks, I got four letters in all. She really shared quite a bit of personal stuff with me. Some of it I already knew, some of it was new to me. She wrote about her dad, about the group. She answered a bunch of my questions--but not all of them. I could tell she was eager to tell part of her story--but it was also a favor she was doing for me. She said she knew that my character was probably already "fashioned" (her word), but not to worry--she was going to answer my questions anyway because she believed my intentions were true, and that I did the right thing by asking.

I was struck by her sweetness. She was generous and helpful in many ways--and I guess now we have a strange sort of pen-pal type relationship. I wouldn't say I'm sympathetic towards her, but I do see her as a person now. And even a good person--in some way; it's another dimension I get to consider every night on stage.

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