Imagine this scene: It's 1960, and John F. Kennedy is running for president. In a New York hotel room, he is strategizing with his brother and closest advisor, Robert Kennedy, about courting "the Negro vote." JFK is annoyed that baseball hero Jackie Robinson is supporting another candidate, while RFK is worried about how to pull it off politically. "How do we go for the Negro vote without pissing off the South?" he muses. For him, civil rights is a tactical issue more than a moral one.
RFK: The Journey to Justice does imagine this scene, and a lot of other private but history-making moments that challenge our heroic visions. The docudrama traces Bobby Kennedy's personal journey, as he travels from being sympathetic to the idea of civil rights but seeing it as a political third rail, to becoming the country's most visible champion, along with Martin Luther King Jr., of America's poor and oppressed of all races.
The new play by L.A. Theatre Works stops at the UMass Fine Arts Center on Tuesday on a national tour, complemented by several community events, including a film screening and a discussion with the actors. The script draws on historical documents, and memories of people who were at his side, to create an onstage/offstage portrait of RFK during the turbulent '60s. Public moments, including formal speeches and Senate hearings, alternate with scenes of backroom bargaining, high-stakes phone calls and staff strategy sessions. The scenes are enlivened by the sounds of doors slamming, phones ringing, gavels banging, drinks sloshing into highball glasses, crowds cheering and racist mobs snarling.
For RFK is a radio play, staged live by the country's premier exponent of the art. L.A. Theatre Works has produced radio theater for over two decades, recording its shows in front of a live audience, often with major stars. The plays are broadcast on public radio stations around the country, with occasional theatrical tours. Most of the shows are adaptations of well-known works by American playwrights, but some, like this one, are new works commissioned for the company. They are presented in the time-honored radio drama format: actors at microphones, scripts in hand, with an onstage Foley artist generating the sound effects called for in the action.
Off the Record
The central characters in RFK are historical figures so iconic that we know them by their initials: JFK, MLK, LBJ. Here we meet them in their shirtsleeves, speaking off the record and off the cuff—and saying things that aren't quoted in the high school history books. JFK's very first line is, "Goddamn Jackie Robinson wouldn't have his goddamn picture taken with me!"
The language is unsentimental and colloquial, but the piece is far from iconoclastic. At bottom, co-authors Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin's script is a respectful, even admiring outline of a politician's moral "journey," as its subject moves from the cautious maneuvering of real-politik to the stirring rhetoric of his campaign stump speeches.
There are moments of grim humor, such as when RFK puts pressure on J. Edgar Hoover to hire more black FBI agents because, as Hoover admits, there are only five out of 5,000, two of them being the Director's own "special agents"—his chauffeur and office boy. And there are passages of invented dialogue that sound more like a radio play than real life: "What's JFK like, Martin? Were you impressed?" "Well, Coretta, it's hard to believe that's the man who's going to lead us to a New Frontier."
Much of the play centers on the Kennedy brothers' touchy relationship with Dr. King, whose direct-action strategy clashed with the government's incremental approach. Just after his brother's election, RFK's sanguine assumption that civil rights leaders "know we're not going to do anything radical" is contrasted with a speech of King's: "The new administration has the opportunity to be the first in 100 years of American history to adopt a radically new approach to the question of civil rights."
In an interview by the Fine Arts Center, playwright Jonathan Estrin says, "Our current civil rights issue is equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens. And yes, the same arguments that were made about civil rights in the '60s are being made now about timing and pushing too far too fast. That is why King's words in this play seem very timely."
As JFK's Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy was thrown unwillingly by events into the civil rights cauldron of the early '60s: Freedom Rides, sit-ins, school desegregation stand-offs and the great 1963 "I have a dream" march on Washington. All these are present in the play, seen mostly from the vantage point of Washington, where Kennedy and his staff respond to them as politically dangerous crises with a "What the hell are we going to do about this?" attitude.
Gradually moved by these events—and his duty as the country's chief law enforcement officer—to take action on behalf of the civil rights activists, RFK is seen as becoming more sensitive to the social movements swirling around him and increasingly willing to join in. As a U.S. Senator following his brother's assassination, he is impatient with Congress's slow-grinding wheels: "I get bored quickly. It takes too long to get things done here."
By the time he decides to run for president, just months before both King and he were gunned down, he's giving speeches condemning the Vietnam War and championing the rights of poor people, and it's activists like farm workers' leader Cesar Chavez who are urging caution: "Maybe you shouldn't go so far. I'm afraid it'll get you in trouble."
Estrin's co-author Murray Horwitz observes, "At the time of their deaths, both King and Kennedy had moved beyond the question of race, and were grappling with the problem of poverty that cut—and still cuts—across all racial lines. That is still, to me, the overarching problem: the civil rights of all citizens, particularly in regard to economic opportunity."
Estrin adds, "The Kennedys were not always idealists, but they were the best kind of public servants, ones who were not stuck in ideology, but were rather able to grow and evolve as the country and circumstances changed." He sees parallels here with the current president—and with Obama's current problems.
"The Congress and the Democratic Party were both divided and factioned at that time, as they seem to be now. I think the thoughtful and moderate approach being taken currently is very much in line with the Kennedys' examination of complex issues by bringing a lot of smart people together to look at a problem from various angles."
RFK: The Journey to Justice: Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, UMass, Feb. 23, 7:30 p.m., (413) 545-2511 or (800) 999-UMAS, or www.umasstix.com.
RFK: Documentary film from the PBS American Experience series, Feb. 18, 7 p.m., Augusta Savage Gallery, New Africa House, UMass, free.
Inside Acting: panel discussion with cast members from L.A. Theatre Works, Feb. 24, 12:30-1:10 p.m., Bartlett Hall, room 65, UMass, free.
