About the Play:

Kennedy's Children has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Kennedy's Children is a full-length drama by Robert Patrick. A group of grown-up children of the 1960s commiserate in a New York bar about how their Kennedy-era dreams have dissolved a decade on. All have had their lives changed forever by a single event, and they are trying to make sense of the world around them where heroes fail us and optimism seems to be lost as well. Kennedy's Children is an actor's monologue goldmine.

Kennedy's Children is about the loss of heroes and the impact a single traumatic event can have on a nation. Set in a Greenwich Village bar in New York on Valentine's Day in the mid 1970s, Robert Patrick's classic play introduces us to five disparate, desperate characters, who grew up with the promise of the Kennedy years: Wanda, a middle class teacher still keeping John F. Kennedy's memory alive despite the inevitable slurs; Sparger, a dropout actor, searching for work, grown bitter and cynical as New York's vital underground theatre movement becomes a commercial wasteland; Rona, a nostalgic former political activist, who mourns the passing of "Janis and Jimi and Jim" and sees the movement collapsing from self-indulgence and apathy; Mark, a Vietnam veteran, now a confused, dissipated drug addict reciting increasingly crazed letters to his mother; and Carla, a Marilyn Monroe-obsessed starlet, whose career has gone nowhere despite her having slept with every producer in town. We hear their stories told in a series of interlinked monologues and few movements, interacting only with a silent barman, learn the course their lives have followed, and wonder at the "what-ifs" which were shattered by a sniper's bullet on November 22, 1963 in Dallas. The day optimism died for a generation – Kennedy's Children.

Kennedy's Children had a workshop debut in 1973 Off Off Broadway at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts and an obscure opening in 1974 Off Off West End in the back of a London pub theatre called the King's Head, in Islington. The show was so successful that after eventually extending its run many times, it moved to a theatre in London's West End, the first time a fringe production had done so. International productions quickly followed in Ireland, Scotland, France (both English and French versions in Paris), Germany, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, South Africa and one in 1975 at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway in New York City. The play has been performed in regional repertory, fringe festival, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 3 male (1 non-speaking)

What people say:

"If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all share the same small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal." — John F. Kennedy from the "Peace Speech", delivered at American University in June 1963

"A blockbuster." — New York Times

"One of the year's ten best." — Time Magazine

"Kennedy's Children provides us with a reminder of how, sometimes, our better natures fail us due to circumstances beyond our control. Each of Kennedy's archetypal lost children, however, did win their dreams in some small degree over the intervening years. We have come some way toward the better world the '60's tried to engender, but with events as they are falling out worldwide now, this play is relevant and watch-worthy. In this way, it may serve as a beacon of hope for things to come." — Dundee Review of the Arts

About the Playwright:

Robert Patrick (1937-2023 ) was born Robert Patrick O'Connor. He was an American playwright and performer who was heavily involved in works at the groundbreaking Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village until it closed in 1968. He went on to have plays produced at the Old Reliable, La MaMa E.T.C., and other off-off-Broadway theatres, earning him the title of New York's most performed playwright of the 1960s. His remarkable play Kennedy's Children captured brilliantly the mood and essence of that great decade, went on to be widely produced, translated into 60 languages, and eventually made its way to Broadway.