JFK Sings on the Moon

Historians and conspiracy theorists have obsessed over every scrap of evidence from the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But we don’t usually pay attention to what the president was doing the night before he died. The president and first lady spent that night at a hotel in Fort Worth, the twin city of Dallas.

Recently, the Fort Worth Opera decided to commission a new opera to tell the story of JFK’s final night. They turned to two up-and-coming stars of contemporary opera, the composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek. Little and Vavrek made their name with a kind of heavy-metal opera they wrote called “Dog Days,” set in a post-apocalyptic America.

Neither of them was alive when Kennedy was killed. And Vavrek is Canadian, so all this was relatively new to him. But for Little, the composer, the mythology was vivid. “I grew up in a family of Irish Catholic Democrats, so JFK and the assassination was definitely something I grew up hearing about,” Little says.

Their challenge for “JFK” was to write an opera about an ordinary night that Jack (played by Matthew Worth) and Jackie (Daniela Mack) spent in a hotel. “To a certain extent, we had a blank slate — we know they went to the hotel, and they went to their suite. We know some things about the suite itself, but beyond that, we don’t know anything until the next morning,” Little says. “So we had this gigantic empty space in the narrative that we had to fill.”

“The story was not apparent initially,” Vavrek says. “We came up with a treatment for the opera that was biographical, almost to a fault.” Then they arrived at an ingenious solution: telling the story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s lives through their dreams over the course of the night.

“We found that if we liberated the story from reality, it allowed us to go deeper into the truth of the story,” says Little. “The dreams teach us about JFK. They get beyond the sense of him as the president and they illuminate him as a man.”

For example, the dreams allowed them to explore the entire arc of the Kennedys’ relationship. “We get to see Jack and Jackie meet for the first time. That’s a very illuminating moment,” Little says. “I really wanted to show them as young people flirting.”

“So much of Jackie's character is shown surrounded in a pall of grief,” Vavrek says. “It really became important to find moments when we could imagine them really, truly happy.”

One thing the opera does not cover is the assassination itself. Instead, the opera hints at it through characters who represent the ancient Greek Fates. “We joke that we avoided the conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination, except for the cosmic conspiracy theory,” Little says.

Recordings from “JFK” are courtesy of the Fort Worth Opera.