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THE JACKIE LOOK Send This Review to a Friend
Performance artist Karen Finley comes on stage impersonating Jackie Kennedy in “The Jackie Look,” complete with right-on attire and dark glasses. Her take is arresting at first, when she shows slides and comments wryly from the late First Lady’s imagined perspective about memorializing of John F. Kennedy in a museum at the Dallas site of the assassination. In a dry manner she sarcastically recounts the souvenirs on display and for sale. Her show begins to look promising.
But as she expands into a long, meandering, illustrated monologue, boredom sets in and one may long to escape. Her theme is Jackie trying to free herself from the icon status as a symbol of grief, delivering such lines as, “Don’t cry for me anymore,” and “Release me from your gaze.”
There are intertwined references to Michelle Obama as Finley riffs on her own status as a First Lady. She eventually works up to a reference of Caroline Kennedy’s refusal to continue the image, and she launches into repeated climactic shouts of “No! No! No!”
Finley can be engaging and dynamic, which resulted some years ago in a tiff with the National Endowment for the Arts when it withdrew funding. (She gives the organization a little dig in this show.) Her boldness is what can make a performance amusing and/or provocative. But this one emerges as a dud, even lackadaisical on the night I saw her. She winds up reading a dense script for a long, long stretch that adds up to a harangue instead of the work of wit she seems to think she has created. Better luck on the next outing. At the Laurie Beechman Theatre in the West Bank Café, 407 West 42nd Street (at 9th Avenue).
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