A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN
NYTimes Critic’s Pick! “That rare thing onstage: a fresh story freshly told. [Jonas] builds this world exquisitely, calibrating the revelations like doses of arsenic, then chasing them with amusing distractions. The staging, by Sarah Hughes, honors both the structural rigor of the Miller and Jonas’s delightfully scruffier dramaturgy. It sees opposing things at once, uplifting and criticizing its characters, respecting and rethinking its source.” — Jesse Green, The New York Times
“Julia May Jonas examines our cultural patrimony through a feminist lens—one so tightly focussed that it burns.” —Helen Shaw, The New Yorker
“Playful, idiosyncratic, and ultimately wrenching. Jonas shifts tones and modes like a composer switching time signatures. Hughes’ actors are sometimes weird and hilarious… sometimes locked-in and devastating.” —Sara Holdren, Vulture/NY Mag
by Julia May Jonas
music & music direction by Brian Cavanagh-Strong
directed by Sarah Hughes
co-produced with The Bushwick Starr
with Brittany K. Allen, Gabriel Brown, Annie Fang, Zoë Geltman, Hannah Heller, Lucy Kaminsky, Drew Lewis, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Dee Pelletier
Line Producer Lucy Powis Scenic Design Brittany Vasta Costume Design Wendy Yang Lighting Design Masha Tsimring Sound Design Jordan McCree Stage Manager Siena Yusi Assistant Stage Manager Sarah Orttung
It’s Cleo’s backyard, Roy’s back in town, and Christine’s brought information. I mean, basil. A riff off Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, A Woman Among Women interrogates catharsis, tragic heroes, and what we expect from our mothers.
A Woman Among Women is part of Julia’s 5-play cycle ALL LONG TRUE AMERICAN STORIES, “a theatrical event that responds to five white ‘male-experience’ plays of the American Western theatrical canon with five full-length plays featuring situations and experiences for other people (mostly women).”
IN PROCESS Here’s Julia on ALL LONG TRUE AMERICAN STORIES generally, and A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN in particular:
“I am using my response plays as interrogations into dramatic form, and what dramatic form posits about gender. ALTAS attempts, in its volume, to test the fluidity versus solidity of gender in “classic” storytelling and narrative structures, to provide not one, but myriad stories that focus on the female body as a subject of interest, and to place characters in situations that ask the audience to confront their preconceived notions of what/who a feminine body can or can’t be or do. The plays will create an immense volume of complex female situations and will willfully/gleefully ignore patriarchal circumstances and constraints.
The plays I am responding to are All My Sons (by Arthur Miller), Long Day’s Journey Into Night, (by Eugene O’Neill), True West, (by Sam Shepard), American Buffalo (by David Mamet) and Zoo Story (by Edward Albee). Each of these plays were used, in my formative years, to teach me about theater — to teach me what “a good play” is, what structure is, what, indeed “American Drama” is. These plays taught me about life – about honor, family, addiction, failure, and violence. They are also remarkably and overwhelmingly concerned with questions of masculinity, and feature men as “actors” and women (if they are featured at all) as bystanders or victims. The ALTAS cycle sets out to examine how American dramatic structures shape our views of gender, and how we interpret our lives through stories. It places characters in situations that ask us to confront our preconceptions of what a feminine body can or can’t do. It reflects back to us how this particular 20th-century canon helped form our common conceptions of what kind of human being is allowed catharsis; is permitted to probe for their essential self; and whose existence we collectively agree to acknowledge as profound.
Although each of the source-material plays situate themselves in Western realist drama, as a writer, I am not a realist – and that tension is intrinsically present in the project. I come from an experimental, avant-garde background – influenced by Richard Forman, Adrienne Kennedy, Big Dance Theater and The Wooster Group, my work sits much more comfortably beneath a Brechtian umbrella. I am interested in provoking the audience to see the mechanism of the performance first before I am interested in moving them. I aim to have emotional connection or empathy be evoked from an audience in spite of a formal presentation that lets us know, from the start, that we are watching all very consciously watching a Play. I do this through heightened, poetic language, through song and dance and physicality, through carefully crafted rhythmic scoring, oddities of phraseology, voiced stage directions, purposeful juxtaposition of setting versus situation, and moments of surrealist magic. To me, the original source-texts I am working with are very strange indeed – and it is my wrestling with their “well-built-ness” in the face of my avant-garde and experimental background that makes this project so artistically engaging.Julia’s project is form.
A Woman Among Women responds to All My Sons – Miller’s Greek-tragedy take on the domestic fallout to America’s involvement in World War II. The play will be ostensibly set in the backyard of Cleo, the matriarch, but the actual physical space will resemble a recovery meeting in a church basement. By doing this, I’m interested in evoking a sense of theater as group therapy, and examining the idea of “catharsis,” both in the dramatic and therapeutic sense. The play will center around a woman who sacrifices her daughter for the sake of her reputation, and the community fallout from this sacrifice. The entire audience will sit in a circle along with the actors and watch Cleo, who begins the play as the “king” of the neighborhood, experience an Aristotelian fall from grace.”
MEET THE LEAD ARTISTS (a collaboration begun in the New Georges Jam!)
Julia May Jonas is a writer and founder of the theater company Nellie Tinder. Recent plays include Your Own Personal Exegesis (LCT3) and Problems Between Sisters (Studio Theatre, Washington, DC). Problems Between Sisters, along with A Woman Among Women (upcoming, New Georges and the Bushwick Starr), are from her five-play-cycle, All Long True American Stories, in which she responds to five canonical male-experience plays with new works for other experiences (mostly female). Her debut novel, Vladimir, was published in February 2022 by Avid Reader Press and was named a “Best Book of 2022” by Time Magazine, New York Public Library, People, New York Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, NPR and others, was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and has been translated into 14 languages. Julia has taught at Skidmore College and New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Brian Cavanagh-Strong is a composer and music director whose work has found a place in theatre, musical theatre, opera, film and television, and has been performed in New York City, regionally, and internationally. Theatre: As a composer, his work has been developed at Lincoln Center Theater, The Bushwick Starr, Ars Nova, New Georges, Montclair State New Works Initiative, American Opera Projects, Black Blox Okhla, and others. Music Supervisor: Anthem/Homunculus (Topic Studios); Eh Dah? Questions For My Father (NYTW) and others. Music Director: Disappearing Man (Cloud City); In A Sea Of Faces (Hypokrit Theatre Company) and others. Film (composer): Saints Rest; Baladi. TV (composer): Sesame Street (HBO). He teaches at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
Sarah Hughes is a director of new plays, radical adaptations, and devised work. Recent: Daphne by Renae Simone Jarrett (LCT3), Galatea by MJ Kaufman (Brooklyn Bridge Park), His Chest Is Only Skeleton by Julia Izumi (Playwrights Horizons), #GRACED by Vanessa Garcia (Zoetic Stage). Sarah is an Associated Artist of New Georges and Target Margin Theater, worked for many years with Elevator Repair Service, and has taught at Dartmouth College, Purchase College, and NYU. As Director of Artistic Programming at Theatre Row, she created the Kitchen Sink Residency for new work development. Drama League Beatrice Terry Resident, Mercury Store Lead Artist, National Directors Fellow, WP Theater Directing Lab Member, Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow, SDCF Barbara Whitman Award Finalist. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. www.sarahcameronhughes.com
ABOUT THE BUSHWICK STARR: THE BUSHWICK STARR is an Obie Award-winning non-profit theater that presents an annual season of new performance work. We are an organization defined by both our artists and our community, and since 2007, we have grown into a thriving theatrical venue, a vital neighborhood arts center, and a destination for exciting and engaging performance. We provide a springboard for emerging professional artists to make career-defining leaps, and we are a sanctuary where established performance companies come to experiment and innovate. We are also a neighborhood playhouse, serving our Bushwick, Brooklyn community’s diverse artistic needs and impulses. Our past Seasons have included new work from groundbreaking artists such as Whitney White, Jeremy O. Harris, Heather Christian, Diana Oh, The Mad Ones, Haruna Lee, Clare Barron, and Daniel Fish. The Starr’s permanent home at 419 Eldert Street will open with A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN in 2024, creating a lasting cultural asset for Bushwick and for artists, students, and audiences across New York City.
homepage & banner photos: Jessika Stocker
A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN is made with support from: The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts; Venturous Theater Fund of Tides Foundation; The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Mental Insight Foundation
A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN has been previously developed through residencies at NACL, The Jam at New Georges, and The Great Plains Theater Conference.
ALSO NOTE Julia spent the early pandemic writing her debut novel, Vladimir, published in February 2022 by Simon and Schuster to loads of attention and rave reviews! Now in paperback! And check this out, slide up to 5:46 and hear Amy Poehler tell Seth Myers that Vladimir is HOT STUFF. Weird? But kinda hot. (Correct.)
