Andrew Brewster Crawford, AKA “A.B.C.,” a playwright obsessed with the glamour, glory, and gloom of the Kennedy era, has written a play about the last day of JFK’s life in order to cast himself as the martyred president, win the love of a beautiful “Jackie Kennedy type,” and live happily ever after in a Camelot of his own creation.
He’s got the great man down. The wind-swept haircut. The sailing-ready nautical digs. The Boston-by-way-of-Harvard accent. The easy witticisms to defuse tension. But in A.B.C.’s quest to fashion himself after his hero, JFK, and mount his magnum opus, he conducts himself more like LBJ, a man who believed that the quickest route from point A to point B ran underground.
O Jackie! is a story about the internal and external chaos created when an artist with both a superman and inferiority complex chooses to be the self he wishes he was, instead of the self he truly is.
