As conceived by Love Story’s creator Connor Hines, the character of John F. Kennedy, Jr. lives in the shadow of a President father he barely remembers and, like Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One, is unwilling to accept the mantle of destiny and expectation that’s been passed down to him. Paul Anthony Kelly also plays him as simply unable: a lost, naive, immature, and reckless boy-king surrounded by bros and cousins, not unlike Shakespeare’s Richard II. Even John’s signature achievement, the creation of George magazine, which advertised itself as “Not Just Politics As Usual,” struggled to find a readership in part because John was unwilling to trade on his own personal celebrity. “You’re a f***ing tragedy,” John’s business partner tells him in one of the show’s heavier-handed allusions to Shakespeare.
The public fascination with the Kennedy family is both the reason Love Story exists and the central dramatic tension between its two lovers. Though John enjoys being in the public eye, he fails to understand what such attention has cost his sister Caroline and will cost his wife Carolyn. “John’s never lost his anonymity,” Carolyn tells her sister Lauren. “He never had any.” As Shakespeare’s Henry IV tells Prince Hal that he “hast lost thy princely privilege / With vile participation,” Caroline tells John, “I had to make a lot of choices to maintain a semblance of privacy” and warns him that Carolyn’s “relationship with the press won’t change until yours does.” As Carolyn’s isolation and feeling of entrapment increases, you keep hoping John’s Hal will transform into Henry V, “disguise his fair nature with hard-favored rage,” and break up the siege of paparazzi camped outside their downtown loft.
Our fascination with the Kennedys, America’s unofficial “royal family,” rivals Shakespeare’s fascination with the Plantagenets, the generations of English kings he chronicled in eight history plays covering over a hundred years and filled with arranged marriages, familial and political rebellions, shifting alliances, and competing dynasties.
Sarah Pidgeon is the reason Love Story works as well as it does, playing Carolyn with a surprising and welcome amount of grit and depth. The casting across the board, in fact, is stellar, and it’s fascinating to see, for example, political royalty Caroline Kennedy (daughter of John) played by acting royalty Grace Gummer (daughter of Meryl Streep). Similarly, the casting of such second- and third-generation actors as Sydney Lemmon (granddaughter of Jack), Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of novelist Ernest), and Talia Balsam (daughter of actors Martin and Joyce Van Patten) makes you realize how many of Shakespeare’s plays about political dynasties are actually about those we might affectionately call nowadays “nepo babies.”
Love Story contains other Shakespearean touches. During their early courtship, there’s an amusing “War of the Roses” montage where Carolyn refuses the daily bouquets John sends her. Carolyn’s job working with Calvin Klein allows for many scenes of the lovers donning clothes like battle armor (and has revived interest in 90s fashion generally and Carolyn’s style particularly). Family matriarchs—first Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then Ethel Kennedy—hold court like Shakespearean kings. Reflecting on the tremendous losses her family has suffered, Ethel says to Carolyn, “I’ve been blessed with a lot to lose” in a moment that resembles John of Gaunt’s great speech in Richard II about “the envy of less happier lands, / This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
