Two shows on stages just outside Washington, “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical” and “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!,” create a diptych of American mythmaking: One character sees the country crumbling and aims to shake it awake, the other sees it in betrayal of its founding principles and tries to burn it down.
The writer Hunter S. Thompson had little regard for professional deadlines, but in “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” running through July 13 at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., he faces one he can’t ignore. With a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a .45 in the other, the bathrobe-clad gonzo journalist — staring at a typewriter that has just landed with a thud onto the stage — neutrally informs the audience: “It’s February 20th, 2005. The day I die.” Then the self-proclaimed “major figure in American history,” played with feral charisma by Eric William Morris, manically attempts to commit his life, and the life of these disunited states, to the page.
Created by Joe Iconis (music, lyrics, book) and Gregory S. Moss (book), and directed with anarchic propulsion by Christopher Ashley, the show is a frenzied, frothing act of theatrical resurrection. Morris is accompanied by a nine-member ensemble that functions as a Greek chorus of demons, muses and collaborators, ferrying us from Thompson’s Louisville boyhood to his professional dust-ups with the Hells Angels and drug-fueled detours through the underside of the American dream. His Colorado home, Owl Farm, serves as both writing bunker and memory palace. Crammed with gewgaws, it looks like the kind of place that would make people rethink their ideas about souvenirs.
Subtlety was never Thompson’s forte, and this bio-musical wisely avoids making it an organizing principle. Iconis’s propulsive score is peppered with protest anthems, beat-poet swagger and a recurring rock ’n’ roll hymn to outsiders and misfits. “All hail Hunter S. Thompson,” the ensemble chants. “Hail to the freak.” Too much exposition? Too little? That depends on your familiarity with Thompson, a philandering husband and neglectful father who ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., cherished his constitutional right to own guns and nursed a near-cellular antipathy toward Nixon (played here by a reptilian George Abud).
Though the show splendidly commits to unfiltered, maximalist expression, quieter moments also resonate, including when a young Hunter (Giovanny Diaz De Leon) reads a copy of “The Great Gatsby” and resolves to one day write into existence a more democratic country.
About an hour’s drive north of the Signature, “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!,” at Baltimore Center Stage (through Sunday), takes a similar metatheatrical approach. But where Thompson barrels toward death, Booth teeters on the edge of it. As the play opens, Booth is seated at a player piano. “I am the author of the most exciting thing to ever happen in American theater,” he purrs. The claim is hard to dismiss, given the nightmarish impact of — and continued fascination with — his act.
In recent years, he has been reimagined in Karen Joy Fowler’s 2022 historical novel, “Booth,” and the 2024 TV series “Manhunt.” Ford’s Theater regularly produces “One Destiny,” a lean two-hander that revisits Lincoln’s assassination through the bewildered memories of ordinary people left in its wake. That play, like Fowler’s novel, largely scants the perspective of the Southern avenger out of principle.
In the shambolic “John Wilkes Booth,” the writer Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men”) opts to place Booth at its center. (Much of Booth’s soliloquy is adapted from his diary and his sister Asia’s memoir.) The show begins as a kind of memory play. As if he were dictating his memoirs, the failed actor (a louche Ben Ahlers of “The Gilded Age”) plunges into a fitful reconstruction of his past, replete with childhood omens; confrontations with his disapproving older brother Edwin (Robbie Tann), a wispy thespian hailed as his generation’s foremost interpreter of Hamlet; and frequent interruptions by a beleaguered prompter (Ked Merwin) who tries to keep a drunken Booth on script.
For all his self-mythologizing, Ahler’s Booth appears as a wan echo of a Luciferian antihero — more peacock than fallen angel. (The visually stunning production includes beautifully textured lighting by Xiangfu Xiao and costumes — velvets, waistcoats, starched collars — by Orla Long.) And under Stevie Walker-Webb’s direction, the show not only amplifies Booth’s delusional behavior but is also largely overdetermined: the errant gunshots throughout needlessly remind us of Booth’s impending end in a tobacco barn after a 12-day manhunt.
Nevertheless, the play effectively makes the case that the more Booth insists on being remembered as a “saint and symbol” of the Lost Cause, the more he reveals himself to be a man who mistook notoriety for greatness. It’s an impulse that, unfortunately, is as alive as ever today.
The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical
Through July 13 at Signature Theater, Arlington, Va.; sigtheatre.org.
John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!
Through June 22 at Baltimore Center Stage; centerstage.org.
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