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| Jeremiah Collins. |
Essentially a one-man show, JFK did use three additional actors (Frank Baginski, John Cain, and Jane Loeb) who were seated amid the audience to ask
questions of the actor playing Pres. John F. Kennedy (co-author Jeremiah
Collins). Collins offered a close physical approximation of the assassinated
leader, Howard Thompson remarking that he “visually slipped into his skin.”
Staged with just a few set pieces, a lectern, desk, and rocking chair, the show
incorporated projections and period music to set the time and locales.
Most reviewers panned the piece, although Thompson wrote, “to
see and hear it, with tightening throat, is to face what we had, what we lost
and perhaps what we were.” Michael Feingold’s negative notice pointed to the
lack of a specific attitude toward the late leader. The work came off as merely
a chronological trip through his words and ended “up telling us not much about
the man and less about the world we live in, for which he was partly
responsible.”
