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One of the great things about making Rip Current was getting to know and work with my co host, Mary Catherine Garrison. We hadn't originally planned to have a second narrative voice on the podcast, so I first met her when I interviewed her about playing Lynnette in the musical Assassins. When we did decide to try a second voice, the first person we contacted was Mary Catherine, and the rest is history. At the end of our last recording session, and I interviewed her a second time to get her
thoughts after going through the entire season. So this episode has both interviews. First my initial interview with Mary Catherine, then or Break, and then the second interview.
So my name is Mary Catherine Garrison. I am an actor, performer, and artist, and I did a whole bunch of Broadway and now I mostly do TV film stuff.
How did you get involved with assassins?
I remember that. I think I'd only done one, maybe two shows on Broadway before that one came about. I'm not a singer, I'm an I guess I'm an actor who sings, and so I remember getting the audition and saying, well, I mean, I just can't do this because it's Sondheim and the agents and everybody was like, no, you should.
It's more of a.
Character type singing gig Well. Stephen Songhim in the room for the audition, I can't remember. I think he was so I think that was pretty crazy, singing his song to his face along with Joe Mantello. But then I got the part, and then nine to eleven happened, and the production was postponed for I think it was a year and a half or two years, and then everybody got back on the saddle.
Wow. Was that like part of the Broadway opening back up after nine to eleven.
I think they waited a while. I think Broadway had been open for a little bit because I think the tone of that show, in particular, I don't think anyone was in the mood to think about people like that. The guns thing for a while, so it took a minute.
Yeah, it's interesting. So what kind of research did you do for this part?
The point they were trying to make was less to be the historical document about these people and their actions, and it was more to make a point about who we are as people and why some people think that that's the route to make their point, to put a
bull's eye on a very public political figure. So most of what happened with the character was dreamt up and just the kind of actor that I am, I like, I need, I need something to be rooted in, something real, and then if it's not totally accurate, at least it's coming from a real place. And at the time, Lynette Throne was still in jail, and so I actually wrote to her, and I think we only had one exchange, And I'm so sorry, Toby. I went to look for these letters and I can't find them. I think they
got thrown out. And I think some boxes in the basement got flooded and rotten, and I think that they got thrown out with that. So it would have been really fun to like scan them for you and you could read them. But I remember I wrote back and I told her I was doing, and I imagine she
got a lot of letters like this. She wrote me that pretty quickly, and it was a very unsallacious letter, which I think the one of the things we learned about a lot of these Manson women was that they were just kind of ended up being regular grandmother type
ladies in jail for a very very long time. And her letter was very kind and very encouraging, and she did not address a lot of Charlie's stuff, but she was still in touch with him at the time, So whatever connection she felt she had with him that led her to do what she did, she was still connected to Charlie at least in some ways, which I thought that was a really interesting realization because she was kind
of wacky. I mean, she was a strange person, but her letter was utterly unwacky, very sane, and she was still theoretically devoted to him. She didn't say that outright, but she implied that they were still in touch. He wasn't what people thought and that kind of thing. But she didn't say a whole lot more than that, which was kind of a bummer, and I think I might have written her again. I think that one letter was all I ever got interesting.
Did she talk at all about her motivations for the assassination?
She didn't, so I had to you know it myself, I guess. But the thing about this show, Assassin's you know, there was a real spectrum of mental health with all of these characters. So and some people were firmly grounded in some political purpose and other people were just wacky. And I think for where Lynette was at the time, for her, it felt like the only thing she could do to get the attention that Charlie needed. I doubt she did the same thing again, but she was a kid when she did it.
So in the play, what motivation is she given that.
It will somehow free Charlie. And I think she thinks that by killing the president, which of course she was unsuccessful doing that, it would somehow bring attention to Charlie and the world would see that he was their savior and not this lunatic criminal that they all believed him to be.
She talks about she was like trying to save the redwoods, that it was an environmental thing. I've also heard people say that's what she said, but it was really all about getting more attention to Manson. It's pretty consistently said she was doing like this weird environmental lobbying kind of and she just got fixated on the fact that the redwoods were dying.
Well, I mean that feels like a very sixty seventies thing to do. Yeah, the whole build up for this character is for that song with her.
And John Hink.
Yeah, so the whole build up for this character was for their duet, and it was just so his was about Jodie Foster and in mine was about Charles Manson, and so the whole drive for my character had to be Charlie.
Right. Interesting. What was attractive about the part for you?
Well, I mean most actors are interested in doing a part that someone will hire them to do, so there's always, you know, just the gratitude of getting a job. And this was a pretty big scale opportunity. I mean I was in my twenties and the director was very encouraging and he really liked what I did, and I just felt like it was a great First of all, to seeing on Broadway, which is not something I ever thought
I would do. That was pretty cool. And then to sing Sondheim something of that caliber was so exciting to me because obviously that's again not what I thought I would ever do. But I like playing parts that I don't want to be the hero or liked all the time. I liked slawed people. I liked that dimension, and I liked that I could make What I wanted to do was make someone who everyone thought was just crazy, but
make her a real person. And I think getting her letter seeing that, well, she actually really is a real person. That's not a stretch. She's not just some looney tunes even if she may have been, I don't know, but she is a real person. And it was a fun challenge to do those with the writing where she was kind of rich and is just crazy, so it was fun to ground it. Does that make sense?
Yeah? It does. And I don't know if this is an answerable question when you're doing that, Like what's kind of your mindset in that situation, Like if you're sort of inhabiting when that's from who is notorious. Everybody knows she is. There's definitely this perception of her as being this wacky Manson girl. What sort of mindset are you in when you're trying to in front of an audience sort of feel like there's more to it?
Than this. Well, I'll tell you that there's two answers. The first answer is that the space I was living in on stage was I have found my calling. I know what I'm supposed to do. I know how to be useful in this world. I know that this man could save us all, and it is my mission to
make sure that he's able to do that. And then the second part of your question is because you know I'm not psychotic, I'm aware there's an audience, so you are performing, so you're not constantly pretending, is what I'm saying. But I got a death threat shortly after because I think we did some interview or something and it came out that I communicated with her, and I ended up getting a death threat in the theater, which is my person only death threat to date, and it was really
quite scary. They had cut out the article that I had been interviewed in and they had drawn blood dripping down the eyes, and it's just set all over it. You will die, Die, Die, die, You should die. You don't deserve to live. Die Die Die Mary Catherine will die over and over and over on this piece of paper.
And my entrance for that show was through the audience because we all the big opening number, we have all there's a big opening number, and then there's a scene that starts, and all the characters, all these different assassins are entering in different ways, and mine happened to be through the audience, and I had to lay on the steps in front of the audience. You know, I could reach out and touch a knee easily. So I never knew did that person come see the show? Are they
going to come see the show? Are they sitting somewhere were they can get to me? I mean, this is we weren't screening for weapons and guns. You know, anything could have happened. You're just wide up in theater. So once that happened, which was pretty shortly after we opened, I had both those things in my head constantly. Nothing else ever happened, So I guess it was just a fluke, but it was pretty scary.
My second interview with Mary Catherine is after the break. So this is the second of the two interviews I did with Mary Catherine. So I was interested like sort of going through this project, reading the scripts, voicing some other stuff from Lynette from whether you had sort of different thoughts about her versus when you were actually playing her on Broadway in Assassins.
For sure.
So when I was doing Assassins, it was the eighteen hundreds and the Internet was not available, which is not exactly true, but there wasn't you, I didn't have access to the kind of information that you would have access to now. And I also stopped doing a lot of research because the Assassins is sort of it's not based in history necessarily. It's more meant like I think the characters are a foundation for the writers the play and the songs to express what they were trying.
To express politically.
So the research I was doing was not useful, it wasn't necessary, So I sort of stopped doing a lot of research at some point. So then I'm just immersed in this version of Squeaky that we invented for the show, and so that's in my mind who she became. And then all these low many years later, here we are
with all this actual, historically accurate information. So it was interesting as I was reading some of it to think about some of the scenes and how I played them and how I was speaking, like how I thought she sound in my head.
I did not do historically accurate version of her.
Which was I was not intending to do that, but it was really interesting to hear to think about what I had done, what the show was saying, and then to hear and read the actual words and hear her voice and like the gentleness ever, so you know, she's softer and more gentle than I played her.
What was interesting if you know that.
She tried to shoot Gerald Ford. People don't really know what happened in between the two. We can only find a certain amount while doing research for it. I think there's like this immediate jump from oh, she was with Manton and then she tried to kill the president, and then there was this whole period in between when you know she was just kind of a drift and sort of yeah, doing these sort of more criminal things to
kind of try and support him. But it wasn't the same sort of being in sort of a hippie cult with all her sisters or however she considered them.
I didn't know that Toby until this, Like, I didn't even get that far in the musical Sarah Jane and Squeaky from or the comic Relief. You know, we were doing like not pratfalls, but like fumbling with our guns because our assassination attempts weren't successful, and so we were supposed to make the audience laugh. It's actually a very dark and heavy thing that happened, and so the juxtaposition of that was really interesting too.
But yeah, the.
Whole how a drift she was, how lost she was the time that, how long he had been in jail at that point, But she was still devoted to him. I mean, it was all it was still about him.
It still is. I think she still is.
I mean when I was writing letters with her, she was still devoted to him.
I mean that's one of the questions at the end, is like how much of it was what she talked about, which is saving the environment, which is actually something that's aged pretty well, I guess, versus like trying to get more people thinking about Charlie Manson in nineteen seventy five, when he'd sort of fallen off the radar.
What's that?
Like a broken clock is right twice a day, Like a cult can have a couple of good points of view, you know, Yeah.
She was smart. It wasn't like she was like incapable of sort of identifying things that were important. But you know, obviously through this haze of manson influence. So while you were doing this play, did you know much about Sarah Jane Moore? Was it just listening to your co star or whatever, playing her singing the songs whatever. Was there a sense of who she was historically or was she just a character?
She was just a character.
And her name is Becky Lynn Baker, by the way, and she's still a good friend of mine. And she was absolutely brilliant in that part. You know. I'm sure she did all of her research, but my job was to do my thing. And of course the two never met in real life. So the absurdity of them sitting on a park bench while Squeaky gets high, which is what one of the scenes was, or they both get high. Actually we were the comic relief in the show. So
that was my take on her. So I had no idea about the FBI Underground Revolutionary.
That whole life. I didn't know any of that. You educate me, Toby, that's what we're trying to do here.
It's just interesting that you know the two women are the comic relief, especially when Sarah Jane Moore it seems as though the reason why she wasn't successful is because she had a gun that was defective that she got at sort of the last second and hadn't had a chance to adjust it.
But in the show she fumbles and drops it and you know, it goes off in her purse. And I think your point is that it's the women who are the comic relief and the other men are taken much more seriously.
Yeah, it's very strange.
It is interesting. I never thought about that.
John Hinckley seems like he'd be more comic fodder with his whole obsession with Jody Foster.
And no, they took that very seriously.
In the show, Squeaky and John Hinckley have a duet, so each song was done in the decade that The Assassin happened. So Stephen Sondheim wrote a song in the style of that decade, and so it's a really wide breadth of musical styles in this show. But because Squeaky and John Hinckley were in the seventies, we had this really cool like seventies ballads, one of the more popular songs on of the show. And it's dead serious. It's dead serious. All John Hinckley scenes are serious interesting.
So, you know, I think people who've been listening to the podcast, are probably interested in sort of what you're up to today in your acting career.
I'm in a show called Somebody Somewhere on HBO. It is my dream job. It's something that I've been so proud of, and we are about to have season three come out at the end of October. Depending on when our listeners are listening, I believe the date is October twenty seventh for season three, we need our viewers.
Hopefully people will tune in.
It's a really, really special show and I'm extremely proud to be part of it.
Yeah, so people should definitely check it out. I've watched it.
Did you like it?
Oh?
Yeah, thank you?
Yeah. I mean it's very different than the stuff that you're used to.
There's no dragons, yeah.
There's very few swords, no car chases. One of our producers is a huge fan.
Oh good.
They were super psyched when they heard you were doing this. That's the end of my interview with Mary Catherine Garrison. I want to send out a big thank you to her for being a part of this project. She was incredible to work with and her voice and personality are a huge part of rip current. Please check her out on Somebody Somewhere on HBO, I'm Toby Ball. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite show. For more information on Rip Current, visit the show website at ripcurrentpod dot com