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A CurtainUp Review
RFK
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I said, are you kidding? If this son-of-a-bitch isn't convicted, I'll jump off the Capitol Building. He was acquitted. Next day he sent me a parachute. ---Robert F. Kennedy on the trial of Jimmy Hoffa, from Jack Holmes' RFK |
Jack Holmes as Robert Kennedy
(Photo: Richard Termine) |
Earnestly tracing Robert F. Kennedy's early career, his success as JFK's campaign manager, fraught relationships with Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, ascendence as a political star in his own right, and untimely death, RFK is educational and well-paced. Holmes makes a spectator, particularly one too young to have experienced the heady 1960's, glad to be more familiar with the seventh child of the Kennedy clan. But RFK also falls into many of the genre's most common traps: cloying nostalgia and too obvious historical narrative..
The play has the look and feel of an extended campaign speech which is supported by the set with its generically elegant furnishings of a politician's home and workplace: a classic desk with gooseneck lamp, a green leather armchair, a table with a standing microphone, arrayed from stage right to left for easy navigation. Upstage stretches an immense canvas covered in irregular blocks of streaky gold and green and plums, like an unattractive, overgrown Rothko. Despite its ugliness, the backdrop does its job, giving the impression of vast physical and psychic horizons, and vaguely recalling television backdrops for newscasts and political debates. As Holmes leaps back and forth between segments of Kennedy's past, from imagined office to senate floor to bustling home, individual sections of the backdrop are lit and successfully evokes an office wall, train windows, a crowd scene, the American flag, and even the right angles of Midwestern state lines, without trying especially hard.
The campaign-speech format fits Holmes' performance which, in its engaging awkwardness, draws a parallel with the optimism and lawyerishness of the last Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. Sometimes, though, Holmes is too awkward. He is fond of realistic acting moves that don't always work in solo performance; for example, the halfhearted miming of some actions, the use of props for others and frenetic switching between conversations with imaginary companions and with the audience. On the whole, though, Kennedy comes alive in his hands, and in the hands of his experienced director, Larry Moss, who earned Obie and Drama Desk awards for his 2001 production The Syringa Tree.
But Holmes' acting is better than his writing, and the limits of his theatrical vision show most clearly in RFK's script. Impassioned rhetoric, politically acceptable faults, and a progressive vision for America are appealing, but they also severely inhibit the scope of Holmes' already timid drama. The text drips with the sentimental language of politicians ("Young people are our most precious commodity". . . "You've got to live in your times, or you haven't lived at all"), and the play seems to swallow these platitudes without dissecting or contending with them.
Slogans are to be expected in a political play. However, Holmes offers no insights about his subject that one couldn't gain from cursory research, no visions about his subject's character or life beyond standard issue biography. Attempts to lend Kennedy's story weight through the incessant quoting of Aeschylus or a focus on RFK's genially unorthodox parenting, are no different from other politician's efforts to humanize their own public image. His guilt over the horrors of the Vietnam War certainly touches an anti-Iraq nerve, but doesn't offer much complexity or insight.
Holmes shows strong interest in perpetuating progressives' nostalgia. Unfortunately, he has not been able to use the intimate, political medium of theater to achieve something more.
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RFK Written and performed by Jack Holmes Director: Larry Moss< Scenic Design: Neil Patel Lighting Design: David Weiner Sound Design: Philip Lojo Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. The Culture Project, 45 Bleeker St. 212/307.4100 From 11/05/05 to 2/05/06; opening 11/15/05. Tickets: $35 and $55 on weekends; $30 and $50 Tuesday through Thursday. Reviewed by Miriam Felton-Dansky based on 11/11/05 performance. |
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