November 22, 1963

Among the most fascinating and enduring suspicions of the Kennedy assassination is that organized crime bosses from Chicago somehow played a role in the murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

Fifty-two years later that theory is coming to the stage as “Assassination Theater: Chicago’s Role in the Crime of The Century,” a dramatization based on the work of Hillel Levin, an investigative reporter, author and former editor of Chicago magazine.

Billed as a “theatrical investigation,” the production will open a 13-week run August 11 at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, 360 North State Street. Tickets are on sale.

In the two-hour show directed by Kevin Christopher Fox, an actor portraying Levin alleges that more than one man shot Kennedy, and he names the organized crime figures behind the plot. Another actor plays Zechariah Shelton, the FBI agent who put Levin on the story.

Hillel Levin

Levin, who was editor of Chicago magazine from 1986 to 1991 and has written extensively about organized crime, said he spent seven years writing “Assassination Theater” and claims to have uncovered “incontrovertible proof” that the Chicago Outfit supplied the shooters of the president and controlled Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Levin premiered the show as a one-night performance last August at the Arts Center of Oak Park in a benefit for the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest.

“I think theater is a very good metaphor for what happened that day [in Dallas],” Levin told Rick Kogan in a 2014 interview on WGN AM 720. “I do believe organized crime was behind it.”

Following the one-night performance, Bruce DuMont, founder and president of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, praised the show in an online video review.

“I think the most important thing is it shows a pattern, it shows a motive, and I think the sort of unstated part of this presentation is the dereliction of duty of media over this period of time — not taking the time to look at the evidence objectively and, to use sort of a hackneyed term, to connect the dots,” DuMont said. “I thought this presentation connected a lot of dots.”