Kait Haire makes for an incandescent, captivating Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy in Tom Dugan’s absorbing, elucidating Tell Him It’s Jackie, now playing live under the stars at the aptly named Dugan’s Backyard Playhouse in Woodland Hills.

L.A. audiences got their first look at Dugan’s one-woman bioplay a few years back at the Wallis when it debuted as Jackie Unveiled.

Trimmed down to a swiftly paced eighty minutes from its earlier longer, two-act format, Tell Him It’s Jackie proves every bit as fascinating as its initial incarnation, and equally packed with juicy tidbits.

The date is June 5, 1968 and 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 former First Lady 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 despite certain disturbing tendencies, 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?” 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 Tell Him It’s Jackie such heady stuff as Jackie recalls marriages and miscarriages, meetings with Richard Nixon (whose apparently sympathetic tears masked a hunger for blood) and Mamie Eisenhower (whose cheesy White House furniture Jackie made sure to quickly replace), and the salty way she veered from the script when rehearsing her ground-breaking televised tour of a redecorated White House.

Most dramatic of all is Jackie’s harrowing moment-by-moment description of a car ride down Elm Street in Dallas and its aftermath, though the play’s bombshell surprise (for this reviewer at least) is its revelation of a long-hushed love affair that, if it didn’t break one of the Ten Commandments, came pretty darned close.

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 liaison), but it’s the humanity he gives his subject that makes Dugan’s play so compelling, that and the playwright/director’s great good fortune in finding the perfect L.A.-based actress to bring Jackie to luminous, spellbinding life.

Plenty of women have brought Jackie to life on the big and small screens, but none have spilled their guts face-to-face like Haire, a dead ringer for the dark-haired beauty so fiercely private, only on the rarest of occasions did the world hear her speak.

Running the gamut of emotions from anger to fear to disgust to joy to despair and more, Haire doesn’t just play Jackie, she is Jackie Kennedy as few have managed to be before her.

Chris and Becky Petersen have constructed a poolside set with a colorful late-‘60s vibe and costumer Polly Gregory captures the era equally perfectly in Jackie’s pale-blue patterned matching top and slacks.

Chris Petersen’s lighting and Steve Shaw’s sound design are both effective as well, with masked audience members seated comfortably on deck chairs in Tom and Amy Dugans’ backyard.

Becky Petersen is stage manager. Amy Dugan is house/box office supervisor. Miles Dugan is box office manager. Trisha Petersen is special technical advisor. Philip Sokoloff is publicist.

No matter what you’ve seen or read about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy before, you’re sure to learn even more at Tom Dugan’s thoroughly winning Tell Him It’s Jackie. And just wait till you hear who’s at the other end of the line.

Dugan’s Backyard Playhouse, Woodland Hills.

–Steven Stanley
May 8, 2021
Photos: Tom Dugan

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Tom Dugan