Scene of the Crime

By LANCE MORROW

JACK RUBY, ALL-AMERICAN BOY

by JOHN LOGAN in association with PAUL BAKER

Dallas was the scene of epic tragedy, but the city has never possessed much of a tragic sense. It has tended to regard itself, somewhat defensively, as a bystander at a drama enacted by out siders. Still, even after more than ten years, there is a complicated fascination in watching the Dallas Theater Center's company replay the events of November 1963 before a Dallas audience.

Not that Jack Ruby, All-American Boy is anything like an indictment of Dallas. Or that John Logan's play deals with conspiracy theories or even with Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassin appears only as a menacing rifleman waiting behind a scrim, and then as a sweating prisoner led down the garage ramp to be shot himself. The focus of this elaborate and populous production is Jack Ruby, the bloody little Sunday morning angel of vengeance.

Logan, 34, an actor and playwright, based his drama on extensive research into Ruby's background. The play is a sort of hallucinatory documentary. It starts, unpromisingly, as a tourists' excursion through a Disneyland museum of the American dream, then settles into Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. Ruby, in his sharkskin suit, hawks strippers and gimmicks like a twister's exercise board. He is pathologically eager to please and to succeed, to manifest the American dream.

The play takes Ruby through the assassination weekend. He greets the killing with a mixture of maudlin sentimentality, explosive violence and foxy commercialism--should he close down the club for the weekend? The assassination of Oswald is treated as an intricate accident of circumstances and personality, history's shabby talent for placing the wrong man at the inexorably right place.

Actor Ken Latimer's Jack Ruby has a nice edge of brusque kindness and craziness, as well as both a vulnerability and homicidal toughness. All of those qualities are impacted against the dream that Ruby could not have: the Kennedys' grace of popular love and easy money. The play is too long and a bit diffuse. Managing Director Paul Baker has been ambitious in his effects: Kennedy motorcade films projected at either side of the stage, disembodied J.F.K. quotes, an unexplained girl (the American success?) dreamily stripping and wrapping herself in bunting on a ladder high above the action. But most of it works very effectively. Dallas audiences respond with standing ovations--which may reflect not only enthusiasm for the performance but also a civic relief, the comfort of the elapsed time between then and now.

Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.