Watching the magnetic Tina Benko chatter about style and death in “Jackie,” you’ve got to wonder: How the heck did she memorize that crazy script, which jumps about without an obvious chronological or emotional through-line?
Unlike the 1997 Broadway extravaganza with the same title, Elfriede Jelinek’s “Jackie” has zero interest in conventional biographical details about the former first lady. This is par for the course for the writer, a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian whose best-known novel is “The Piano Teacher.” Her plays had never been staged in America until this Women’s Project production, and you can see why: “Jackie” is a relentless, seemingly shapeless stream of consciousness filled with rage and morbid black humor.
Director Tea Alagic has staged the piece in the bottom of an abandoned pool. Frozen in her 30s, Jackie, glorious in a 1960s-style, peach-colored dress, prowls Marsha Ginsberg’s bilevel set, climbing up and down a ladder to the pool’s edge. Occasionally, she drags along faceless dummies labeled “Ari,” “Bobby” and “Jack.”
There is some name-dropping, most excessively of Marilyn: “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” Jackie sings in a grotesque little girl’s voice, before snapping, “Give me a break!”
Overall, though, this Jackie cares less about the rival Monroe than she does about fashion and that November day in Dallas. She often links the two in jarring associations: “The cerebellum was dangling from the back of his head on a single strand of tissue — that’s how one could describe my new dress, which I will be wearing only once, like all my other dresses.”
Sensitive souls may want to steer clear.
Jelinek does have a way with nastily witty epigrams. Drawing laughs for her is like drawing blood: “Someone like [Sylvia] Plath never becomes an icon,” Jackie sniffs, “except for stupid women who think they have gotten a brain of their own.”
It takes someone of Benko’s caliber to take command of this stuff. A heartbreaking Birdie in the 2010 revival of “The Little Foxes,” the lanky actress has Jackie’s natural patrician elegance, but this isn’t an act of mimicry. Instead, she suggests the sharp, knowing intelligence of a woman fully aware of her options.
“Jackie” isn’t for everybody, but those ready to meet its challenge will find it mesmerizing.