John Lampe has appeared in films such as 72 Hours: A Brooklyn Love Story and Here Lies a Drunken Asshole and his theatre credits include a national tour of The Lightning Thief and playing Paul Bratter in Barefoot in the Park and Claudio in Measure for Measure.
Together with Michael Wysong they are known in the USA for their subversive irreverence, of which their new satirical musical The TUNEabomber (premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe) is a perfect example. It imagines that eco-terrorist Ted Kaczynski really wanted to be a musical theatre star – and is performing for the parole board.
I asked John about Kaczynski, his influence and whether lampooning a killer helps puncture the mystique he’s acquired in some quarters.
Why does the Unabomber have such notoriety in the USA? Was it the crimes or the fact that he remained at liberty so long?
It’s probably a combination of factors. For one, the bombing spree lasted for such a long time before there were any leads. He sent his first bomb in 1978 and wasn’t caught until 1996. There were sometimes long gaps between attacks, often years, so there was a lot of unpredictability around when and where he’d strike. The bombs were usually in innocuous-looking packages, so there wasn’t a good way to know, before opening the seemingly innocent box, that it was rigged to explode.
But I think that the fascination with Ted comes mostly from his personality and who he was. Here’s this Harvard-educated man with a PhD in mathematics who is arrested in his remote cabin in Montana after writing a 35,000 word essay about the dangers of industrialised society. That’s a pretty unique CV for a criminal. Add onto it that his arrest and subsequent trial were all over television, from CNN to SNL, and he was instantly famous. And because we have 35,000 words of his “manifesto” (a term he reportedly hated), we have a lot of insight into his thought process. Also, his message resonated with a lot of people.
In our show, of course, we turn that on its head and instead of retelling Ted’s life and his crimes in a straightforward way, we prefer to skew the perspective and turn him into a wannabe musical theatre star. We found that’s a lot more entertaining. But people are always surprised to find out just how much of his story is true (other than anything having to do with theatre). He lived an incredibly interesting life.
Musicals have been getting edgier in recent years, are you trying to push the envelope by choosing Ted Kaczynski as the subject?
There wasn’t a conscious effort to write anything controversial, so much as we thought the premise of the show would be fun. We structured the show like an evening at a cabaret theatre, imagining what it would have been like if Ted had gotten his ‘moment to shine’ as a performer and not as a terrorist. On paper, there’s really nothing edgy about the show. It’s a musical comedy with songs in the style you’d expect of that genre. What makes it unique is the subject and how we’ve chosen to handle it.
We didn’t set out to write anything with a political message or with some underlying commentary to it, but I suppose that’s inherent in all works of theatre, whether you intend it or not. It all started with the pun ‘Tune-abomber’, and we haven’t taken ourselves too seriously since then.
Are there subjects you would consider off-limits in your work or does it depend on how they are handled?
In general, I think that content and intent are the key to any work of comedy. You can write a musical about anything depending on how you choose to tell the story. If you say, “I’m going to write a show about Nazis,” that is immediately going to raise some eyebrows. But then you have Cabaret and The Producers who both handled that subject in wildly different and effective ways.
For us, it was always more interesting and more entertaining to make Ted the focus of the show. We’d rather poke fun at him than at his victims or his family, the people who led to him being arrested in the first place. It’s an amazing story how he ended up getting caught, a combination of his own hubris and his sister-in-law’s ingenuity. The show works better when the scope is narrowed to be about making fun of the attacker rather than those he attacked.
Kaczynski has admirers and apologists (and that might increase following his recent death) does lampooning him help puncture the false mystique?
I hope so. There are certain corners of the internet (and we’ve had to interact with them now) who think of ‘Uncle Ted’ as a sympathetic figure. I reject that notion. He was a murderer, plain and simple. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a fascinating person. Murderers often are! But he shouldn’t be celebrated or seen as a hero because he made some good points about the dangers of over-industrialising. He also made some terrible points and at the end of the day, his methods were abhorrent.
I think for both of us, it was important to find a way to take his power away – whatever power one can have from a supermax prison cell. The best way to do that, we felt, was with laughter. There’s nothing scary about Ted when you realise how much there is to laugh about. I hope anyone who sees this show realises that Ted Kaczynski was not a person to look up to.
Lastly, The Edinburgh Fringe – it’s a big commitment and a huge cost for performers, why do people to cross continents to take part?
Edinburgh Fringe has maintained its mystique as a mecca for performing artists. There are shows that start there and make their way to the West End, or to Broadway, or even onto television. For us, it‘s a chance to test our mettle and to see how this show works outside of the US. We’ve had a chance to play it in New York and a few other American cities and we’re confident that the show will resonate with people internationally, even if they couldn’t pick Montana out on a map. Not to mention getting the chance to see other shows at the Fringe and experience the electricity of all of those artists, working hard to showcase their art across the city. We’re just thrilled to get to be a part of it.
