Telling the RFK story
CAMBRIDGE -- Jack Holmes is a Juilliard-trained composer and a rare-book expert. So how did he come to be starring in his one-man show "RFK," which opened this week at the Stuart Street Playhouse?
Holmes, who is also a playwright, acknowledges that he didn't start out with a driving passion for Robert F. Kennedy. "I had a meeting with an agent who told me I looked like RFK," the actor says over dinner at Casablanca in Harvard Square. "Completely off the top of my head I told her I was working on a play about him, and she encouraged me to do it."
Although Holmes had read Arthur Schlesinger's comprehensive biography "Robert Kennedy and His Times," he says he had no idea where to start. "My wife and I were in a secondhand bookstore in Hoboken, and there was a box filled with books, letters, and RFK memorabilia," he says. "Someone's entire collection had just been dropped in my lap."
Holmes's fascination with history, which serves him well in his work with rare books, also helped in his research for the play. "The most important element was deciding what the pivotal moment in this guy's life was," says Holmes, who's based in Pasadena, Calif. "I didn't want to start out in the Ambassador Hotel [where RFK was assassinated in 1968] and go back in time. I wanted to find that moment when everything changed for him."
In a life like Kennedy's, so many things seem pivotal: his role in the racketeering prosecutions he initiated as attorney general in his brother's administration, President Kennedy's assassination, RFK's position in his family. But Holmes said he decided on the moment when Lyndon Johnson informed RFK he didn't need him as his running mate in the 1964 presidential election. "The play opens in the summer of '64 with RFK back in his office, furious with the way Johnson has treated him," says Holmes. "But he's also at a loss. What is he going to do now?"
Holmes says Kennedy's path from there -- first in his campaign for a US Senate seat in New York, then in his decisions as senator (including voting for money for a war he felt was wrong), followed by his short-lived run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination -- all revealed a complicated and compassionate man. "He was very shy, a loner," says Holmes, "and a terrible campaigner when he had to stand in front of a camera and make a commercial. But he was also very intuitive and emotionally available, and he came alive when he spoke extemporaneously."
Although Holmes includes selections from some of Kennedy's most famous speeches, including the night he told a crowd Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated and his stirring speech about what the gross national product doesn't measure ("everything that makes life worthwhile"), Holmes says he's tried to stay focused on the man behind the image. "I am talking to the audience in a direct address," he says. "They connect with his struggles."
The play has been evolving since 1999, when Holmes first staged the piece at a community theater in Sierra Madre, Calif., with his wife as director. He then moved it to the Court Theatre in Los Angeles with Jenny Sullivan as director, to Off-Broadway with Larry Moss ("The Syringa Tree" ) directing it as a one-act, and now to Boston where, with director Seth Greenleaf, he's expanded the format back to two acts.
"I've gotten an incredible response from audiences, especially people who knew him," says Holmes. "The biggest compliment came from Paul Schrade [Kennedy's aide], who was with him at the A m bassador Hotel and was also shot there. He told me it was a very accurate portrayal."
"RFK" has an open-ended run. Tickets: $39.50. 800-447-7400, telecharge.com.
