Capital Fringe: RFK

– by guest writer Kevin Rodden –

RFK:  45 years after and we still can’t forget him

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed 50 years ago. His brother, Robert Francis Kennedy, died 45 years ago this summer. To commemorate these dual national tragedies, Philadelphia’s New City Stage Company brings Jack Holmes’ RFK to the Capital Fringe right here in our nation’s capital. 

The Kennedy family retains a certain mystique in American culture, though perhaps laced with macabre expectations of the next family tragedy. Indeed, there is something classically tragic, something shocking yet inevitable in each new grim chapter.

RFK begins in 1964, and has the feel of a memory play, told from the perspective of Robert Kennedy as he jumps back and forth in time, through his early political career prosecuting Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, his various diplomatic trips to South Africa and Poland, his complex relationship with his father, and finally his 1968 presidential campaign.

Actor Russ Widdall inhabits Bobby and his various interlocutors in this multimedia performance that evokes the era of Vietnam, Rock and Roll, and all the turmoil of the 1960s. His celebrated performance received some of Philadelphia’s best reviews during its run at the Adrienne Theatre as part of New City Stage Company’s 2012-2013 season.

The show was so popular that it will start off the 2013-14 for New City and coincide with the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.  Directed by Ginger Dayle, Founding Artistic Director of the company as well as a Kennedy scholar, RFK offers an intimate look into the life and career of this beloved figure.

In a time of political uncertainty of our own, as special interests and lobbies bombard our elected leaders with moral compromises, RFK’s struggle for clarity and idealism, more than ever, belongs here in Washington, D.C.

New City Stage Company is proud to present the story of this complex and admirable American right on the stage of the Studio Theatre, right in the middle of the city that gave him his first political job and attempted to give him his last.

Presented as part of the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival, a program of the Washington, D.C. non-profit Capital Fringe.

 

— Kevin Rodden is an Artistic Associate and the Education Director at New City Stage Company in Philadelphia. —
Part of Fringe Peeks, our “in their own words” series