Jack’s Last Call: Say Goodbye to Kerouac is now available as a one-hour special program for public radio stations. Broadway star Len Cariou plays a featured role in the audio play directed and produced by award winning audio dramatist Sue Zizza. This 59-minute production is currently available free to stations at The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and will soon also be available free at The Content Depot.
The audio play — recorded in part at Gunther’s Tap Room, one of the celebrated author’s favorite Long Island drinking spots— was created in conjunction with the many celebrations around the 50th anniversary of the publishing of On The Road and was adapted by Zizza and playwright Patrick Fenton from an earlier Fenton-penned stage production, Kerouac’s Last Call. Fenton’s stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, New York Newsday, and the Daily News. It wasn’t until Fenton’s newspaper articles, and his aforementioned play, that fans and scholars learned about this important turning point in Kerouac’s life.
Based on more than 12 years of research about Kerouac’s Queens and Long Island lives, Jack’s Last Call opens in August 1964, at the moment when his life was moving toward its end and he prepares to leave his Northport home to live in Florida with his mother Memere.
Blending both the facts of that last night from tape recordings made by a friend of Kerouac’s with other occurrences throughout Kerouac’s life, listeners meet the shy, sensitive, complicated Kerouac who fled his own fame in 1957 after On the Road was published. Jack’s Last Call also introdices the listener to the many important people who shaped his work oincluding his mother Memere, father Leo, daughter Jan, brother Gerard, friend Neal Cassady and many others. Tony Award winning actor Len Cariou plays the journalist who is writing his story.
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| Jack's Last Call Synopsis |
The drinking, the fame that grew after On the Road was published, the battles with his family — these parts of Jack Kerouac’s life, which made him a cultural icon of the American 50’s, are well known to many. But there is another part of Kerouac that only a few villagers from the quiet hamlet of Northport on Long Island had the chance to see up close. This is the Kerouac presented in Patrick Fenton’s original audio play Jack’s Last Call: Say Goodbye to Kerouac.
On this last Long Island night, Jack thinks back to the America he saw riding alongside Neal Cassady as they drove back and forth across the country. As the memories play through his mind, Jack receives a series of soul-searching phone calls from his daughter, Jan, who is desperate to connect with the man she believes to be her father.
It’s an honest portrayal of, and an elegy to, a man whose writings helped shape a generation and a nation.
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Available for broadcast free to public radio stations on
The Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
.
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Call (516) 658-0423
or
E-mail: jackslastcall@gmail.com
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Funding provided in part by Midsummer Sound Company, LLC and The Beckerman Archives.
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