KEROUAC: THE ESSENCE OF JACK
I don’t think Jack Kerouac was ahead of his time, or that he died too young. He was his time. He died on time. And he took his time with him, leaving behind a distorted legend as “king of the beats.” He also left behind a substantial body of literature so honest and open that no amount of media slander and cultural hype can wholly obscure the man behind the legend. Not if you do your research. Not if you go back to the original source.
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Vincent Balestri, playwright and sole actor of Kerouac: The Essence of Jack, has apparently studied Kerouac to the point of obsession. And Balestri’s talent as an actor, and his identification with his subject, resurrects a Kerouac so real it’s eerie. Of course, there’s a lot to cover in Kerouac’s life: his relationship with his mother, his development as a writer, his travels, his egotism, his innumerable sorrows and irrepressible joys, not to mention his work. And, if you’re a Kerouac fan–and I’ll admit I am–you’ll come to this show with expectations as sprawling in scope as Kerouac’s own life. How does Balestri live up to that challenge? He goes for the essence of Jack, not a comprehensive chronicle, but a way of being, doing, singing, so that even the random moment defines the man.
The point where the show really took off–and Balestri, the medium, became a clear vessel–was when Kerouac spun a comic tirade on how the media, and his own publishers, misrepresented the beats. Kerouac shows a few photos of himself that were put on his book jackets. An early one looks thoughtful, with downcast eyes, like the one you often see of Fitzgerald on covers of his novels. But later, when the publishers wanted to capitalize on the wild, drug-crazed notoriety of the beats, they used one that made Kerouac look like a thug. Then, jumping from the personal to the cultural, Kerouac whips out a movie poster of The Beat Generation. The poster illustration is tawdry, none too Zen, and laughably lurid. Kerouac points out the “beatnik” character, who’s wearing black leather gloves, the housewife who will be raped by beatniks, and the cop with his gun, who is the only figure of real violence. And Kerouac races on in this vein–describing, editorializing, mimicking, telling the story. It’s the young Kerouac, the Buddhist lunatic, on a roll.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jami Craig.
