By Arlene McKanic
The slip is quickly covered up by a robe, the glossy dark hair by a turban. We're now with Jackie in her Fifth Avenue apartment. She's dying, painfully, but not before she finishes a portrait of her long time companion, Maurice Templesman. The stress of her illness probably brings on a harrowing flashback of Dallas, and from there we and Jackie are propelled backwards into her life. The turban disappears and the robe is replaced by a pearl pink shantung sheath with a bow at the waist. This outfit takes her from her days as a naughty-but-precocious schoolgirl to her marriage to Ari Onassis, the batrachian billionaire who indulged and protected her, to her days as an editor at Doubleday and her meeting the stalwart and financially savvy Maurice.
In addition to Jackie, Reese briefly plays a crotchety schoolmarm, and her mother, Janet, a social climbing termagant who would now be called abusive and who was considered “high-strung” back in the day. A shapeless green hat transforms Reese into this woman (I'm dying for someone to write a biography of Janet) who spends her time reviling and cleaning up after Jackie's charismatic drunk of a dad and haranguing Jackie to marry a rich man, even if he bores her rigid. It was a stroke of both good and bad luck that Jackie met Jack Kennedy, a rich man who didn't bore her at all.
“He was the love of her life,” said the ebullient Reese during a Q & A after the show.
From there we're led through Jackie's disappointing wedding – her father didn't walk her down the aisle, because 1) he was too drunk and 2) Janet wouldn't have let him anyway. There's the move into the tacky White House and Jackie's brilliant renovation of it.
Reese plays the scene where she leads TV cameras through the spruced-up museum wearing a grotesque Jackie mask, her normally husky voice screwed into that little girl breathiness we all remember. When the cameras are turned off she rips off the mask and nearly collapses in relief.
We get to see plenty of insights into Jackie's life: There's Jackie giving advice and comfort to her sister-in-law Joan, whose husband Ted seems as much as a tomcat as his older brother Jack; the ghastly day at Dallas; and Jackie putting on a brave face for her children, and even dancing an Irish jig for Caroline's benefit.
There's also Jackie waking up screaming from nightmares, and crumpling in such grief before a televised address that only a shot from Dr. Feelgood (Paul Urban) can revive her. The doctor was famous for plying his celebrity patients with a mix of amphetamines and animal secretions that he swore were only vitamin B shots. Urban is rather a strange addition to this one-woman play; he has two scenes, both bathed in hellish red, where he tends to the exhausted Jackie. I'm not quite sure why he of all the people in Jackie's life gets to put in an appearance, as opposed to let's say, Bobby, who's not mentioned at all. But that's a quibble.
Reese is amazing as Jackie. She looks disconcertingly like her subject, with the same build, strong Gallic jawbone, wide-spaced eyes and dark flip. She not only gets Jackie's voices, both the normal and little girl versions, but as the play's writer, she gets the unusual and original way Jackie had with words. But without her acting abilities Reese's physical appearance would be merely interesting. Check out how her face sags with hurt during a recording of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” or Jackie's transformation as she approaches her premature death. She goes, in an instant, from a healthy, sexy, young woman to a pain-wracked wraith in what seems like the blink of an eye.
Directed by Charles Messina, “Cirque Jacqueline” (the title was inspired by Jackie's childhood fantasy of running away to join the circus) was a wonderful tribute to a brave, smart and complex woman.
