Jeffrey Mosser: Welcome to another episode of the From the Ground Up podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mosser, recording from the ancestral homeland of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These episodes are shared digitally to the internet. Let’s take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology, structure, and ways of thinking that we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the work we make leaves a significant carbon footprint contributing to climate change that disproportionately affects indigenous people worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging the truth and violence perpetrated in the name of this country as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization and allyship.
Dear artists, this episode is unlike any other that I have been able to record because it so directly connects to a creative process and a personal creative process at that. So a big part of the work that I am interested in is how we as ensemble artists can recreate the work of other ensembles. It’s really rare to find a published script of an ensemble-created work, as mentioned in my call with John Schneider of Theatre X among the others at the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute at Pig Iron Theatre. I am always fascinated at how devised work is captured in a script format. In a call with Quinn Bauriedel of Pig Iron Theatre Company in season one, he talks about this process as a few of their plays are published. But I’m always blown away because in a devising process, very often characters are created around the performer’s personal skills, which makes the context for interpreting the script that much more complex.
In the same vein, for a playwright to capture that moment through their subjective lens, even just in the attempt to document the event while simultaneously telling the story is a challenge. This call with playwright Jaclyn Backhaus explores her experience writing for the Theater Reconstruction Ensemble during the creation of You on the Moors Now, which I was directing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For this call, I was joined by my student actors and the stage managers on the show, and you’ll actually get to hear some of their questions at the end.
Jaclyn has a great body of work that I highly encourage you to check out. I definitely gravitated towards You on the Moors Now because of the anachronism in it and the epic scale of the content, just like her play Men on Boats. We’re going to get into what it’s like to be a playwright on a devising process and how this play came into being. A few people, places, and things that we chatted about, and I’ll leave in the show’s transcript at howlround.com: Jon Riddleberger, The Hypocrites, and American Theater Company. Jaclyn joined us on February 4, 2024 and Zoomed in from Lenape land, now known as Brooklyn, New York. Enjoy.
Hello, hello, Jaclyn, how are you?
Jaclyn Backhaus: I’m pretty good. How are you?
Jeffrey: Jaclyn, I am here with a cohort of actors who are doing You on the Moors Now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Everybody say hello again. And we’re so excited to be talking to you today, and we want to thank you so much for letting us record this and connect the dots with all of these fine folks here as we work on your piece. It’s been such a joy. We’re in week three now, and so we’ve been rocking and rolling for a little while now. I had the privilege of seeing Men on Boats at New American Theatre in Chicago at one point, and I just missed The Hypocrites’ version of You on the Moors Now because I was in grad school and couldn’t find another minute in my life to go see it, too busy making theatre. But I had that script in my head for so long, for such a long moment.
And Arnel Sancianco was your lighting design and a really good buddy of mine. And then I got into reading more and more of You on the Moors Now, and I realized the Jon Riddleberger was in the original cast, and I know him from Actors Theatre of Louisville, so like, oh my gosh, my world has got so small and then so much smaller and so much smaller. So it brings me a lot of really great joy and nostalgia to be working on this piece, and so I want to thank you for bringing it into the world. So I guess I’m just curious, where were you in your life, what were you doing right before it led up to you writing You on the Moors Now with the ensemble?
Jaclyn: Sure. So fun fact about me and Jon Riddleberger and a bunch of other folks who were part of this particular devising collective, Theater Reconstruction Ensemble [TRE], a lot of us met in college in our undergrad program. A ton of us went to NYU, and we were all training and acting, but also learning that we loved other facets of theatremaking in that time that maybe were calling us in stronger ways than perhaps acting was. And so there was a nice cluster of us who had become really fond of devising in college and who decided after college that we wanted to stay in the city. We’re based in New York. We wanted to try and stay there, and we wanted to try and collectively build processes that were able to allow us to explore those different facets of our interest inside theatremaking in a manner to celebrate each other’s strengths and promote each other’s modes of inquiry and still also do that while we’re also juggling our several day jobs and our other aspirations and trying to hold down apartments and all that good post-grad stuff.
So I had Jon Riddleberger, Anastasia Olowin, Lawrence Von Patras, a bunch of the folks who had gone to school with me and particularly one of our colleagues, John Kurzynowski. We all were continuing to make work together after school, and it was really John Kurzynowski, it was a devising collective, but a lot of the early works and early explorations were led by him. I feel like he had a clear sense of what he was interested in engaging with as a devising director. So often he would gather us for weeks at a time throughout those first couple of years out of school, and we’d all gather around a classic text, maybe a classic play, maybe a couple of different classic plays, maybe it was even a film. We’d spend a week just playing around with it. He would give us exercises where we would go off and devise little moments based on passages of text from these classic pieces.
And it really did feel like it was very holistic and with the aim to just try things and keep our minds active and engaged in our… It wasn’t until, I would say, a few of those iterations of workshop process along that we started to build out actual shows. And a lot of TRE, because it was a collective effort, but it was really born of the mind and impulses of John Kurzynowski, at first we were doing classic plays that were upended and had a devising bent to them, whether it was a take on the tone or skewing a story for Hamlet, for example, skewing a story to really be able to flesh out some of the side characters’ journeys or to upend maybe notions of how the play should be done. We also did A Doll’s House. We were doing classic texts that were based on existing translations.
And then there was a version of, I think we wanted to do something around American realism at some point, and we were having a lot of trouble getting the rights to some of those plays because William Inge’s Estate was like, “No, you can’t be weird with this.” Arthur Miller, same thing. They were like, “You can’t.” So I think it was at that point that I was like, “Well, I’m pretty good at writing, so why don’t I just write a version of an American realism play from that time period, and then we can send it up and play with it and explore it the way that we do with those classic texts?” And the company was like, “Great.”
So we did a play that is not published of mine. It was called Set in the Living Room of a Small Town American Play. That was our American realism play. We also did a Chekhov one, where it was based on two Chekhov plays. We mashed them together. It was called MASHAMASHAMASHA. The Three Seagulls or MASHAMASHAMASHA was the full title. So I started to find myself in a text-making practice inside the ensemble collective. I had acted in things, but I was really getting more interested in my writing voice. And we were self-producing these plays, doing them in small theatres, and so when it came time to decide or think about what our next exploration was, I can’t remember whose idea it really was, but I think it must have been some version of the Ensembles and John Kurzynowski and me.
And we were like, “We’ve done plays now. We’ve done versions of the canon. We’ve explored the canon. What does it look like to expand our idea of exploring the canon from just theatre to exploring the literary canon as well?” And I think that that led us down the road to eventually landing in the world of You on the Moors Now. So all that to say, long story short, it was born of a willingness and a desire to keep collaborating with people who we found joy working with, and we let that collaboration grow and change and evolve over many years before we got to this process.
Jeffrey: That’s great. You mentioned that you tried to use everyone’s talents as you were coming out of undergrad, and everyone still had particular talents and skills. Is that how some of the, I don’t know, irreverency came out of it too? Just thinking, for example, the Andrews Sisters moment with the March Sisters of them singing, were they particularly strong singers, or was it just all of a sudden, “Hey, let’s sing a song here. What if it turns into this?” What strengths were used in that original iteration that we can maybe map now on the other side of it, being so many, few years later?
I was coming in with a mode of inquiry that was celebrated by the rest of the group, and we were all in that space of sharing with each other.
Jaclyn: That’s a really great question. I think we workshopped this particular play in a lot of different ways over many years, and I think that a lot of the irreverence, I think, comes from a place of definitely playing to people’s strengths, of course, but also to the idea of saying yes to things, I think was, just the spirit of the game. So when it comes to the scene with Joseph and Nellie, it was very much about those two actors had a very clown sensibility. They had an interest in doing strange, irreverent voices. They were really good at clowning with each other. The March Sisters, we were interested in just presenting them as a collective, and those three actors were very dynamic together. The four leads, the four lead women and the four lead men, I would say the main couples or the lovers or however you’d call them, there was a lot of little instances of the way that they liked to play with language or the way that they liked to be in space with each other.
I would just pick up on those things over many years. But we used to do these kinds of things in the early stages of a process where we’d ask the actors if there were any dreams that they had for things that they’d want to ever do on stage. And it was always really, really fun to receive that kind of input, I think, because it allowed me to then… Maybe I didn’t get to utilize all of them in the drafting process, but anytime where I was flummoxed by the text, the source materials themselves, I could also utilize the wishes and the thoughts and hopes and dreams of the ensemble and really try to make those things happen for them. Actually it’s funny because it’s all melded in my brain now. It’s like where their inspiration in devising ends and where the play begins, the whole of the script is really born of the fact that I was coming in with a mode of inquiry that was celebrated by the rest of the group, and we were all in that space of sharing with each other.
Jeffrey: I’ve discovered that this play has quite a wide popularity in undergraduate populations or in university populations in looking through, and I’m wondering what it feels like to have this play being done by groups that are not the original devising ensemble. I interview a lot of ensemble theatremakers, and so rarely do they get to have their piece redone or recreated. And so it’s a really cool thing to be talking to you with this play published. So I guess to my question, what’s it like to see this play performed after it was created by a particular ensemble with this particular set of sensibilities?
Jaclyn: It’s really quite moving to me. I’ve only been able to see it done, beyond the original production, twice. I was able to see The Hypocrites production, which because that was the first time it was done outside of the ensemble and because that particular group and the director of that production, Devon de Mayo, had advocated for me to join up with them at some point during the process and relook at the script with the group, that was a really, really impactful second production, which I think I’d only ever seen one of my plays done by people that weren’t directly next to me. So it was all very shocking, very new, but as an experience just to see your work done ever again, you’re like, “I’m going to make this, I’m going to do it. No one’s ever going to pay it any mind.” That’s the feeling I was going into everything with. So it was totally trippy, but it was also really exciting to get a chance to jump back in with the text again.
And then I got to see it once more recently, I got to see it at the Strasberg School. NYU did it last spring, so I got to see it again. And both times, what was really moving to me was I could sense something. I think it was born of working with TRE and with those actors, and it’s continued to be a ethos for me as a writer. If I can just make something that it feels like an actor is having fun doing or having fun exploring or finding joy within, then I really feel like I’ve achieved something, like I’ve succeeded at my job. It’s, making theatre is so hard and really diving into something for these long hours and these long processes can be so tough. So if there’s something that I can offer to a collaborator that feels like a morsel of joy, then I’m like, “I’m winning, I’m doing it.”
And so when I get to see it, especially with the younger companies or companies in undergrad, it feels really, really awesome to see those large group moments, to see the moments even in the duo scene work, where it feels like both actors are really getting a chance to get into it with each other, find their agency, find their joy, find their funny moments, it does bring me back to those early days of creating the show with the people who I really adore and reliving watching them find the morsels of joy inside the piece. So it’s really nice. And also because these books, the source material is so nostalgic, there’s nostalgia baked into the whole thing. Even the battle, where I talk about Home Alone and Nickelodeon, it’s like there’s nostalgia baked into how I wrote it as well. So I just have, a great fondness washes over me when I get to experience it again.
Jeffrey: It’s great. We’re having no fun working on it. No joy whatsoever.
Jaclyn: Great. Well, I’ll send you all some… I don’t know.
Jeffrey: Send us some new pages then. No, I’m teasing. We’ve actually had such a delight. It’s been fun really finding the joy. You’re absolutely right that finding joy is something that we should keep an eye on, for sure, I think, for that. So you talked a little bit about how these novels are something you used as source material. What was it like to mash time periods together, and what’s the inspiration for allowing that to happen in this play?
Jaclyn: That’s a great question. When I go back and I think about what possessed us to not just adapt one but four thick novels, I’m like, “Really, we did that?” But I do think we were feeling bold and excited about the previous devising work we’d done around mashing up source materials or drawing from several source materials. We did that for the American Realism play that I had mentioned before. It wasn’t really drawing from source materials, but it was taking a lot of inspiration from the pantheon of those works.
And then also the Chekhov adaptation we did, which was really a true mashup. That was also a version where we did a big traffic jam of a thing. And at the time of the writing, I had been also working on Men on Boats simultaneously. And Men on Boats, I was playing with a similar thing at the time, where I was taking a very old source material and really just jamming it into anachronistic language as a way for me to understand the story, first and foremost. And I think with both of these works, with that play and with You on the Moors Now, I was taking these old source materials. I was trying to find commonalities between them, trying to find unifying ties that could allow them to create a cohesive story.
There was a period of time where TRE wasn’t rehearsing, and it was just me. I was doing a lot of drafting at that point in order to bring pages into the group to workshop, or even just ideas. And I remember just reading through all of this material, which is quite accessible still, a credit to those writers from the 1800s, they knew what they were doing. They made very accessible books. But still trying to find my way through them. And the twenty-first century language that was part of my everyday life was really just, at first, a vessel for me to parse through what felt like a way for me to contemporize or make even more familiar some of the themes and through-lines.
But then what I found was that in looking at these four books and in finding the initial kernel of what felt like a real commonality across them, which was the moment when the women refused the proposal in their various ways, that felt like the first time I was like, “Oh, we can do this. I found a story point in each that speaks to it, speaks to each other.” And then from there, I just got really excited about running with that. I feel like the whole crew got excited about running with that, and everyone was also quite excited about the anachronistic language again, or at least what it felt like to move from the classic text or the quotes from the book, the famous scene, the Lizzie-Darcy scene, which has pretty much verbatim text from Pride and Prejudice. Moving from that language into stuff that felt so visceral and immediate, that was really exciting for the actors to play with.
So it was really born from being able to see that excitement in them, especially in working out the first act of the play, allowed me to then push into a little bit of a hypothesis that I had as a writer, which is like, what would it mean to not ever have to explain that, but actually go even further, bringing these characters into a world that resembles our own in some ways? It wasn’t something I set out to do, but I think it was a little bit of the way I was processing my writing at the time met with the way it seemed to be the actors, and my collaborators seemed to be responding to it.
Jeffrey: So I guess I want to get into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty of the devising process for you. Where were you as playwright meeting the devising process?
Jaclyn: I think by this process with TRE, I think this was the first one that I came in as the writer and not as a collaborating actor, or an actor who was good at text, or an actor who had a lot of time to write. I might be wrong, but I think at this point I was like, “I’m the writer of this.” And I think that the way that we started was that we all went away to read the books themselves and get familiar with the source material. And my job, I think at that point I was already trying to find out what narratively I was interested in doing with these books. And I think this is cultivated from John and from our earlier devising processes, but we were always interested in locating the moments, all of us, and sharing the moments in the source material text that we were all excited about.
And I remember during the first workshop we did, which I don’t think I had much text by then, I think we were doing a exploratory workshop about the novels. And I remember a lot of people said, “Anytime there was a ball, there was a ball.” We were so excited about the ball. And so John was like, “So on the Thursday of our workshop, we’re going to have a ball. We’re going to come in, we’re going to bring our outfit, we’re going to just bring music, we’re going to have this rehearsal space.” We did it in cool lighting. I’m going to get it wrong, but I feel like we did something where we either drew names out of a hat or we came with characters we wanted to play, and we just improv-ed a ball for two hours.
It was so fun, and me and John would walk around, whisper prompts to folks like, “But the person over there, that’s the person that you hate but love,” giving people archetypal relationships that felt sort of similar to the book. The ball did not end up… There is the reunion in the play, but it’s very, very different. We were trying to write a ball into this thing because that improv was so much fun. We didn’t end up doing it, but I think that early on it was very much like we’re coming to be exploratory with these books. And then I took a lot of, it felt like, from what people said, their interests and their excitements in the source text. And then I really tried to work with that in bringing pages to the next iteration of a workshop. And we had a couple of touchpoint workshops like that where it felt like we were building the play in stages.
In the early one, it was a lot of character development, learning from the actors about who they were embodying and how they might be. And for John, it was a lot of learning about the staging and what it means to put this play in space. And as we moved forward into the process, because I would participate in some of those early workshops as an extra performer or sometimes my role would shift in that way. But as we were moving into me drafting act two and bringing that in and the crew workshopping it, and then me bringing act three in, which happened much later. Act three was a big hypothesis. We were trying to figure it out for a long time.
But it did feel like from the beginning I was the writer. The whole ensemble was really activating around a lot of the questions of the source text in the way that we would when we were doing a upended adaptation or a version of an Ibsen. But then in this version, I would take those questions and probes of the source text and attempt to really try to weave them into the fabric of the writing for the next iteration.
Jeffrey: That leads perfectly into another question that I have that one of our actors has brought up. So there are certain characters that are quite a ways away in terms of character choice, pretty far away from where they are, particularly Marmee, like Marmee being the super giving, I’m going to go take care of the orphans, I’m going to go do all these things, here’s a family that needs help. She takes care of everybody, and we see Marmee as a turncoat. So I guess, how did you make the choice to deviate from the storylines in that way?
Jaclyn: Such a great question. I feel like at some point, I don’t know how this answer is going to seem, but I think it was inspiration overload. I was having this moment of being, as a writer, I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, there’s too much to do. There’s so many parts we love. There’s so many things that we love about these things. I can’t fit them all into this play.” It was like my writer’s impulses were starting to reject themselves. So I think there was one session of writing or one workshop or I can’t remember what it was, but we were like, “What happens when we actually just do something completely the opposite of the books? How does that make us feel? Does it make me feel good? Is it interesting to us?”
I think that the Marmee and old Mr. Lawrence, the whole notion of spies, a lot of twist genre stuff that I started to pull from a lot of different other source materials to aid me in, I’m sorry, I’m mincing my words, but to just help me overcome that feeling of the pressure to do right by every single parameter of these beloved books. There was so much pressure to make sure that everyone’s favorite parts of those books would be represented. And so I started to really be afraid of that and then let the fear lead me to a totally different choice.
A lot of them, it was the kind of thing where I’d bring things in, and it felt like I had this great sounding board of an ensemble who asked all the right questions of the work when it did those things. And it did feel like the ones that know, Marmee being one, how the couples do or do not end up together in the end felt like another big one. But it felt like when people were responding or felt interested or felt like they were curious or leaning forward when those choices were made differently, then I felt like they were working. And sometimes when there were tons of things that I can’t even remember them now, but pages and pages of the draft that completely fell away, when I was like, “Maybe I don’t actually need to make that choice, or maybe I can do something different a different time.”
It was also, because I was working with these amazing actors, sometimes an actor would read something so outlandish and make it totally work. I feel like the Marmee thing was one of those things. The Rivers Sister was another one, St. John and the Rivers Sister from Jane Eyre. There were times when I was watching these actors do amazing things with this text that I was just throwing spaghetti to a wall and let’s see what happens. And then be like, “Oh, they’re so good. They can do anything.” And letting them take those moments and run with them. It was a lot of reciprocal energy like that of me being like, “I don’t know. What do you think?” And them being like, “Sure, let me try it.”
And then me being like, “Actually there’s interesting stuff there. Let me take that back and rework it.” And through that, then the elements of the thing looked totally different from the source material just by virtue of that continual imprint. It’s funny when I try to trace, even when I got the questions earlier, I was like, “Oh, how did we get there?” But all I can say is it was through a lot of very generous what-if work on behalf of the whole group.
Jeffrey: Was there any other impetus to having those more meta or self-referential moments, or was it just to continue to be in communion with the source material?
Jaclyn: Something was coming up, I think, for a lot of us, me as the writer and the ensemble too, when maybe conversations around the first time that we encountered these books. A lot of us encountered Little Women, reading it when we were nine or ten, seeing the Winona Ryder movie because the Greta Gerwig hadn’t been out by that time. Maybe not all of us had read Jane Eyre. In fact, I don’t think I had read it until it was part of this group of four books. I was like, “Oh, that’s one I got to read. I better read this.” So we were coming at them all of us at different points in our lives, but we had so many fruitful conversations about the moment that Pride and Prejudice really landed with us and where we were as people at that time. For me, I was a teenager, I was going through my teenage angst.
So we were bringing in, all of us we’re bringing in these different selves, like the self were when we were collaborating on the thing, the self we were when we had first watched the movie at a sleepover, the self we were when we were assigned it in junior year English and didn’t read it but watched the movie. We were interfacing with a lot of different time periods actually, because we were bringing in all of those different selves. And so it’s so fascinating to work on a piece that has had some kind of touch point with you in various stages of your life because then it feels like you’re in community, in communion with the source material, but you’re also in communion with your past lives or your past selves, the ways that you’ve evolved. I don’t know. I was in the room writing with my seven-year-old, twelve-year-old, sixteen-year-old, twenty-five-year-old selves, and I was trying to find gratitude in all of them, laughing at all of the people I’ve been.
Jeffrey: I want to offer up the floor to y’all to ask any questions that you all might have as well. So listen, anything and everything is on the table. So any questions, comments, concerns. We have the playwright right in front of us, anything you might have. We’re all gnawing on our fingernails.
Mikaela: So there’s a lot of movement—
Jeffrey: Can you say your name and introduce yourself just a little bit?
Mikaela: [I’m Mikaela, I play] Cathy
Jaclyn: Hi.
Mikaela: What was the inspiration behind the movement aspect of the piece, because that’s a big part of this and opening scene, just really interesting. So I’m wondering if that was something you knew you wanted to add in there when you started making this story or that came along as you were writing?
Jaclyn: I always think of my plays as a blueprint for dynamic movement and staging. And I think it was through a lot of working with TRE helped found that for me, that we can find spatial awareness and interesting especially ensemble movement that is directly tied to the text, inspired by, maybe not tied to it at all, but that it’s really inspiring to watch. So that first set of stage directions, I wrote that out as a poem, not necessarily intending for it to be… mostly just to find the tone. And then everyone really responded to it. The way that it looks has shifted dynamically over different productions. I’ve seen ones where everyone is really running. The one that we ended up landing on in the TRE production was actually someone reading the poem and people standing still.
And I feel like it’s always an invitation though for me to folks, if they’re able to be inspired to find a movement or a shared movement vocabulary amongst each other, then I feel like it’s a really exciting opportunity for an ensemble to make that together. And it is really exciting, every time I’ve seen any of my plays, there’s people do so many different things with the movement. And because I’m not a director, I’m always just like, “Wow.” I always get really excited. But I’m a really bad dancer, so also I’m moved by the innovation, but also just the ability to go for something.
So I feel like I was interested with this in capturing some kind of sweeping-ness and capturing the tone. And I think anytime that that is brought through in the movement or how the ensemble tackles the movement specifically for this piece, it feels like you’re opening the page of the book and stepping into the sweeping landscapes and understanding some of the things that are part of these worlds that we maybe wouldn’t necessarily get from the stage version and also maybe wouldn’t necessarily understand in a different way just by reading the books themselves.
George: Hi, my name is George. I play Heathcliff. But I was just really curious if you could just talk a bit more about just with that whole act and obviously the shift with it. And then specifically, I guess, for my health and for Cathy-Heathcliff’s just whole bit towards the end there, just about the significance about that and how it came about.
Jaclyn: So for the ends, that’s a great question. The end of that play, it took us a long time to find out what we wanted to do. I know that at some point we knew that we wanted to have a reunion, or we wanted to have a moment where all the characters were in space together, and we didn’t quite know how it would function. The idea for the prose work came on much later. I feel like it was maybe at the beginning. It was very, very close leading up to our rehearsal process, and I was actively revising that whole act a lot through the rehearsal process for the actual production. But I was really interested, I think, in the idea, the prose bit of it got me really excited to honor, come back to the original source material and really try my take at working with text in that way, especially theatrically. And it felt really exciting for all of us to get into as an ensemble.
And it took us to a place of, especially because Cathy dies and Cathy is in Wuthering Heights, she’s very much still a presence after her death. She dies really early on in the book, and then she does haunt the rest of the book. And the actress who played Cathy, who’s one of my dear friends, Anastasia, she is one of the founding members of the ensemble, and we were really excited about giving her something that allowed her a lot of stage presence. We were like, “I think you’re gonna do the Elevator Repair Service, which is a devising, the Gatz thing.” There was a production of Great Gatsby they did where there was this one guy who read the whole book and people would come in and play characters, but he basically memorized the whole text.
So we were like, “Anastasia, you’re going to do the thing. You’re going to be the narrator.” And so we were interested in preserving her lack of presence in the space, but preserving her presence in the ethos of the story and in the delivery of this story. And we got to that thing where we were coming up and having fun with, “where is everyone now?” We had a lot of fun with making everyone’s little menial jobs and where they’re at in their various stages of middle age or wherever. And we got really fixated about Heathcliff because also from the source material, Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff never really recovered. He becomes more of a monster. He was really, really dealing with a lot of grief and rage and anger, and the issues he’s had over his life just continue to be compounded by his person.
And so we were like, “We know exactly who he is, and we know that he’s the kind of person that would not take to any of this, would call it out for what it is, and would actively try to work against everyone working together because he’s still so heart-sore about what happened and what happened to his love.” And then I feel like the last moment of the play, it felt a little bit bigger. I can’t even really speak to where I was and what I was writing about at the time, but it did feel a little bit like I was trying to speak to something bigger than any of the texts themselves or even the story itself. It felt like I was trying to offer peace to someone who was unsettled in the way that Cathy comforts him and tells him to shut up and tells him to stop burning things and gives him advice in that direct way that they always spoke to each other.
I was really trying to offer a little bit of a meditation on, I guess, death and what happens after. And I don’t know, it was an interesting way to end the play because it felt similar in some ways to the way it starts, but it’s so different from where it goes. But it did feel like in many ways it was an offering to the actor who played Cathy, who was able to just really bring such beautiful life to that last passage. And it also felt like a way to put to rest all of these characters who’ve been alive for a long time, put them to rest in this play, at least. It’s the kind of thing with a big play like this, or with any play, you say the writers, that old thing that’s like every ball that you toss up in the air, you have to catch.
By the end of the play in that last act, it feels like especially those attendants who are working the party are catching every single ball that the whole play has thrown up the whole time. And then after all that madcap chaos, can we land in a moment of quiet, or a moment where people are speaking to each other across time, across planes? And what does that do? Where does that leave us? Maybe somewhere interesting, weird, and unexpected. We worked on it for a long time. It’s hard to figure it out. Made a lot of cuts. But it does feel like there are a couple of moments in the play where I feel like I read them, and I feel moved, or they still speak to me even now after, it’s been maybe about ten years since I started working on this. But that’s one of them. I think there’s some truth in there that I’m still working out for myself.
Jeffrey: We have time for maybe one more question.
Megan: Hi, my name is Megan, and I play Jo. My question is, how aware are each character of their own storylines, and how does that play into their actions or lack of actions?
Jaclyn: Great question. We played with this a lot. And even in The Hypocrites, the Chicago production, which happened shortly after the New York production, there was a whole design aspect of enforcing the awareness that all characters had about the books themselves, about the storylines themselves. I feel like it really did carry over to the actors who were in those central core relationships as well, Jo and Laurie included. And initially I feel like it felt interesting to watch the actors play in the early production. It felt like in some scenes, Jo is super, super aware, and then in some scenes it feels like she’s really not. To me it comes back to Jo’s ethos as a character. Jo, in Little Women, feels so, so aware of her own determination and her own ambition, her own dreams to be a writer. She seems so oblivious to elements of her own plot.
In the book, it feels like she’s either totally in denial about how Laurie feels about her or has just no idea and is completely blindsided by that revelation when he proposes to her. So it’s like she’s almost unaware of her whole story in some ways, and it hits her like a ton of bricks when it hits her. And I feel the same way in the various iterations in the play, but also in the movies, in the book, when she goes to New York. She’s very, very aware of, “I’m here in New York. I met this professor. I’m kind of intrigued” and what’s happening to her family, she kind of blocks it out. She’s acting as though she’s unaware of it until the news comes back her sister is dying and she has to rush back.
As soon as it hits her like a ton of bricks, she resets and takes that awareness with her. But there’s a obliviousness that she moves through the world as a character. And I think it allowed our actor who played Jo in the original production, Laurence Juan Patras, the ability to turn it on and then turn it off and be like, “No, I’m fine. Everything’s cool. We’re here. I took this job in this bar. It’s great.” And then anytime that the larger context drops a hammer, she’s like, “Oh, shit.” Oh, sorry, am I allowed to say this on a podcast? I don’t know.
Jeffrey: Yeah, you are now.
Jaclyn: Well, okay. Then she takes everything she learns, she brushes off the shock, and she’s like, “I’m moving now with all of this information into the next stage of my life,” which I find that very identifiable. I don’t know what my story’s going to be, but sometimes the context just comes rushing in, all I have are my wits and my dreams and my friends and family. Until then, we’ll see. But all this to say, I think you can really have fun playing with when does it feel like your character is aware of her story. She probably has carried some awareness in, and that feels like a fun thing to activate. And then there are times when Jo is just oblivious and has no idea, and you can play into that too. So I think that’s a fun facet of that character.
Megan: Thank you.
Jeffrey: A couple of last questions for you. One, this play does deal with gender quite specifically, and I’m wondering, was there a statement on gender that you intended to make or ultimately did make while writing or while creating this with the ensemble?
Jaclyn: I think so. I think that the query that the piece is making on gender, it does feel like it’s rooted in the queries that the books offer, and those books offered them 150 years ago. And I do feel like there is a common sensibility of 2013, ’14 that we were playing within the room as an ensemble and trying to tackle in a way that felt like it was building on maybe our own sensibilities. For me as a younger cis woman, the ways in which our society has grown past or still has yet to grow, like questions around my autonomy, my ability to choose my partner, my ability to move through the world with my own agency. And I feel like where the play ends or where we stopped working on it and where the play is picking up now, I feel like there’s way more work the play can do, and there’s way more of a perspective that an ensemble can give it now that I feel like continues to offer more nuance than the play gives on the page.
And I think also that there are other plays and other works that are doing it in similar ways now, but are building off of wherever that conversation may have left off from. I don’t know if y’all saw Barbie, but there’s the whole war in Barbie. The playfulness of the war feels so similar to the playfulness of the war in this version. And I would say You on the Moors Now, Barbie, we’re both speaking to a feminism or an idea of feminism that was started 60 to 150 years ago and still has so much nuance to explore. So would I say that this is my definitive work on gender? Absolutely not. And I think that there’s still more to say, and I also think there are more plays that speak to gender and gender spectrum and issues around gender expression than maybe this play does. And so I’m like, if this play lives inside the pantheon of those and other plays do it better, then I’m happy for them. I think that we should be doing those plays too.
Jeffrey: Thank you for that. Barbie has come up once or twice or one hundred times.
Jaclyn: Oh yeah?
Jeffrey: For sure.
Jaclyn: I saw it with one of the original actors from this, and she hit me on the arm during…
Jeffrey: “We did this!”
Jaclyn: Right. But also it’s cool that every time, that’s another part of the play. Whenever I’ve seen it, the take on how people do the war is so jolly, delightful, and zany, and totally different than the time before. So yeah.
Jeffrey: Last question for you for now. What are you working on now? What’s in the works for you? Are you still writing plays? What are you writing? What are you working on?
Jaclyn: Let’s see. What am I working on? I’m the kind of person I always work on four or five things at a time. So I’m doing that again. I have a couple of plays that I’m working on right now commissioned for a theatre in New Jersey called Two River Theater. A commission that I was given a while back at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been working on that. And a lot of those plays, they’re delving into a little bit more of a personal family history, history of lineage, and ancestry of my own. So I’m still very much working in, inside a time period and bringing what it means to mush the olden days with now. But definitely working with the source material now feels a little bit more personal, and that’s been a really interesting time, a really interesting writing practice for me to delve into some of these old family stories and stories from my growing up and putting those on stage.
So I’m working on some plays. I’m working on a TV pilot. We’ll see how that goes. But just working on a little mystery show, but trying to keep busy and trying to stay writing. It’s been really interesting to move to a space where I’m writing less for a known entity, like an ensemble like this, and moving into writing for a hypothetical group of people. But it’s been a real joy, and if anyone ever is interested in talking about writing or wants to talk about writing process, writing plays, feel free to find me.
Jeffrey: Great. Can we take a big Zoom screenshot together?
Jaclyn: Yeah, sure.
Jeffrey: Awesome. Jaclyn, thank you so much for your time. I can’t tell you how much this means to me and these folks here.
Jaclyn: This was awesome. I’m so glad y’all are doing it. I hope you have a great time. Break a leg. Give it the old one-two. I don’t know. Have the best time. Send me pictures too. Send me pictures.
Jeffrey: A big thanks to UW-Milwaukee, my students, and of course, Jaclyn for her time. I felt really lucky to be able to share this experience with my students as they begin to understand that the devising process can lead to great and even published plays such as You on The Moors Now. As with so many other ensemble plays, Jaclyn really relied on the expertise of the actors and their skills, interests, and instincts. For whatever reason, one of my favorite things is how playwrights can just throw caution to the wind and change things so quickly just to try out. The effort and the insight necessary is just exciting to me, and for them to have that clarity is lovely, and it was really clear that Jaclyn is excited to try things out in her process.
Folks, we are looking at the end of season four with our next episode, and it just so happens that you may have already heard it. For the 2024 TCG Conference, we recorded a live Zoomed episode with Studio Luna members, Maya Malan-Gonzalez and Alexandra Meda. Episode ten is an unedited version of that call, including a little bonus content just for you, podcast listeners. So tune in and find out how they’ve transitioned their mission and their physical location from Chicago to LA. All right, keep exploring those big ideas, artists, and we’ll catch you next time on From the Ground Up.
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