Saffron Burrows grants Wallis Center For The Performing Arts an up-close-and-personal, warts-and-all tête-à-tête with one of the 20th century’s most famous, most speculated about, and most enigmatic of legends in Jackie Unveiled, Tom Dugan’s gripping, elucidating look at the woman who was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

Plenty of actresses have brought Jackie to life on the big and small screens, but none have spilled their guts face-to-face like Burrows, who not only looks and sounds the part, but captures the raw essence of a woman so fiercely private, only on the rarest of occasions did the world hear her speak.

The date is June 5, 1968 and a 38-year-old Jackie has just heard the news that her assassinated husband’s younger brother Bobby has himself fallen victim to an assassin’s bullets, an event so devastating that Jackie has decided for the second time to take her own life, but not before making us her final confessors.

Raised by a bitter, violent mother and a father whom she adored (but one with a propensity for shampooing his seventeen-year-old daughter’s hair as she soaked in the bathtub and then drying her off), Jackie first met her future husband’s family at age twenty-two, and since patriarch “Papa Joe” believed she had what counted most for a Kennedy wife—beauty, brains, and breeding—Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. selected Jacqueline Lee Bouvier to be his son’s blushing bride.

Not that marriage to Jack was any bed of roses, but when your own father is a man with whom you and your sister routinely played the game “Who’ve you had?” (“Have you had her, Daddy?” “Not yet, but we have plans after lunch.”), you learn to put up with a lot, and Jackie loved Jack despite the many humiliations.

It’s precisely these sorts of intimate disclosures that make Jackie Unveiled such heady stuff as Jackie recalls marriages and miscarriages, meetings with Richard Nixon (whose apparently sympathetic tears masked a hunger for blood) and Mamie “Ethel Mertz” Eisenhower (who didn’t even offer Jackie a seat when she visited the White House just after delivering daughter Caroline via C-section), and a love affair that, if it didn’t break one of the Ten Commandments, came pretty darned close.

And we haven’t even gotten to an Act Two taking place twenty-six years after the first that includes a harrowing moment-by-moment description of a car ride down Elm Street in Dallas and its aftermath.

Playwright Dugan has clearly done his Jackie homework, aided by once classified CIA and Secret Service reports to which earlier biographers were not privy (hence the inclusion of the aforementioned extramarital affair), but it’s the humanity he gives his subject, not the shock value of his revelations, that makes Dugan’s play so compelling, that and the luminous performance of his riveting star under Jenny Sullivan’s masterful direction.

Not only does Burrows (aided by dialect coach Elizabeth Himelstein) find the distinctive Jackie vowels so few of her interpreters have managed to replicate, the gamut of emotions she runs, from anger to fear to disgust to joy to despair and more, is quite simply dazzling, and with Burrows playing her, Jackie Kennedy Onassis proves one heck of a hostess.

Scenic designer François-Pierre Couture gives us Jackie’s Upper East Side apartment circa 1968/1994 down to the most minutely realized detail. Jared A. Sayeg’s superb lighting design pulls us in at dramatic moments with almost imperceptible subtlety, then goes dramatic when Jackie’s mind goes haywire and stark when her memories turn to Dallas.

Marcy Froehlich designs for Burrows a couple of just-right outfits to wear, with hair designer Frances Mathias giving Act One Jackie her signature late-‘60s look.

Sound designer Randall Robert Tico opens the show with 1968 California primary election/Kennedy shooting reports, then stirs in astutely chosen musical underscoring and effects.

Katherine Barrett is production stage manager. Casting is by Phyllis Schuringa, CSA. L.A. stage star Paige Lindsey White understudies Burrows.

No matter what you’ve seen or read about Jackie Kennedy Onassis before, you’ve never had the chance to spend a one-on-one evening with her until now. With so personal an invite chez Jackie, you’d be foolish not to RSVP yes.

Lovelace Studio Theatre, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills.
www.thewallis.org

–Steven Stanley
February 28, 2018
Photos: Luke Fontana

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Saffron Burrows, Tom Dugan, Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts