Before Robert “Bobby” Kennedy wrote his first play, he spent 25 years writing books few people were meant to read.
As a technical writer, Kennedy produced disaster-recovery manuals and other practical documents designed for moments of crisis. The work was exacting and largely anonymous.
“I labored in obscurity for 25 years,” Kennedy said. “I wrote very good material that, you know, as a technical writer, you don’t sign your name to that.”
Now, at 63, Kennedy is putting his name — or rather, his pen name — before an audience. Writing as Lyon Kennedy, he will present a staged reading of his first play, “The Ghost of Fallujah,” at 5 p.m. Sunday, May 17, at the Pine Plains Community Center.
The reading, with scripts in hand, will feature 10 actors from the Hudson Valley. Kennedy described the event as both a public introduction and a test of a work he has spent two years revising.
“It doesn’t matter what the playwright thinks in their heads,” Kennedy said. “It matters what the audience says. This is my self financed crash course.”
“The Ghost of Fallujah” follows JP, a young soldier nicknamed Crash, who walks away from his unit in Fallujah and is shot. His fellow soldiers believe he has died. He survives, recuperates in a military hospital in Germany and later, after returning to the United States, seeks out the men who thought they had lost him.
The play is fictional, Kennedy said, but rooted in his own experience as a young soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division. Kennedy served from 1984 to 1986, after the U.S. invasion of Grenada and before the invasion of Panama, he said. He was not deployed, but said the hazards and discipline of Army life left a permanent mark.
“It was serious,” Kennedy said. “I was eager to get out of there eventually.”
In the play, JP’s search for his former comrades becomes a journey through fractured versions of American life. He visits a Native American friend on a reservation in New Mexico, a Black friend in Jackson, Miss., and an Irish Catholic sergeant in Boston. Each man has carried the war home differently, some through addiction and trauma, others through guilt.
Kennedy calls the play anti-war, though not in a way he hopes will feel didactic.
“It is an anti-war piece, but it’s not a shallow, shout at the top of your lungs anti-war piece,” he said. “It shows the futility of separating innocent from guilty people.”
The title comes from JP’s decision to appear before his former Army friends in costume, wearing white clothing, long hair, and a beard. He does not immediately reveal himself, allowing the men to think, at least for a moment, that they may be seeing a ghost.
That conceit gives the play both tension and dark humor. In the Boston scene, Kennedy said, JP’s conversation with his hard-drinking Irish Catholic sergeant becomes one of the funniest passages in the play, as the two men talk about the afterlife, faith, and what may await them beyond death.
The humor sits beside more painful material. Kennedy said the play contains adult themes, profanity he said is typical of soldiers, and descriptions of war that may be disturbing.
“If you’re going to commit people to combat and potentially getting killed, it’s a serious matter,” he said. “It’s a serious, serious matter.”
Kennedy was born in 1962 and grew up outside Philadelphia, the 11th of 13 children in an Irish Catholic family. He had 10 brothers, eight of them older, and described the household as intense and competitive.
“I think of my family as like a fight a day,” he said. “It was constant turmoil, very, very challenging family.”
Kennedy studied English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, then drove a cab and worked as a bartender before joining the Army. Later, after visiting a girlfriend in Germany, he stayed there for five years, learned the language and passed a test to study at a university.
He moved to Pine Plains in 2019, drawn by the Hudson Valley and the privacy of a small house with land. He now lives off Chase Road and has found in Pine Plains both quiet and creative possibility.
Kennedy, along with Pine Plains resident Darrah Cloud, is a member of the Hudson River Writers Lab in Rhinebeck, where professional actors read scripts over Zoom and where he found support while learning the craft of playwriting. Along with Cloud, Kennedy credited Robert Lyons, an experienced playwright, producer and director, as an important mentor.
“We’d go to our lunches and we’d talk in detail about plays and playwriting, and he was very supportive of my scripts,” Kennedy said.
The first draft of “The Ghost of Fallujah,” Kennedy said, came quickly — too quickly.
“It took me a couple weeks in the delusion that I thought I had a play,” he said.
Two years of work followed, including classes, reading, revisions and feedback. Kennedy said he has tried to give the play what he called a spine: a central premise strong enough to hold its many characters and locations together.
That premise, he said, is simple but difficult.
“Self-acceptance comes before social acceptance,” Kennedy said. “JP doesn’t accept himself because of certain things that happen. And he’s looking for, you know, whatever everyone looks for, comfort and security and attention from his buddies.”
A reading of “The Ghost of Fallujah” by Lyon Kennedy is scheduled for Sunday, May 17, at 5 p.m. at the Pine Plains Community Center located above the Pine Plains Free Library. The reading is free to attend and recommended for mature audiences only due to language and graphic descriptions of war.