Towards a Reckoning: Rachel Bonds and the Language of Pain

Born in a small Tennessee town, Rachel Bonds began writing plays as an undergraduate at Brown University. When her father died during her sophomore year, Bonds used her writing as a creative and healing outlet. The loss echoes in her work today: “I’m still always writing about grief,” she said. “I cannot seem to get away from it.” But Bonds’ interest in how place effects pain—a core concern of her plays—emerges from a sense of pain as a fact of life, rather than a fact of her own biography. For her, playwriting entails an encounter with the messy and often uncomfortable contradictions that make us human; as she explained in a 2016 interview, “I want to make something haunting and memorable. I want to make something I find really ugly.”

Throughout her work, Bonds returns to grief—as a theme, an emotion, and an experience in need of reckoning—and explores it anew, crafting characters who are startling in with their familiarity and fallibility. Her early works, which include Anniversary (2010) and At the Old Place (2013), occur in small, isolated towns and examine individual and communal experiences of loss. Bonds followed up those plays with a quick succession of dark, contemplative, and deeply humorous plays: Swimmers (2013) and Five Mile Lake (2013 Weissberger Award). In both, she examines lives in transition and in the midst of uncertain futures, while imbuing her characters with care and transforming their worlds into urgent, utterly relatable concerns.

With The Wolfe Twins, her 2014 commission for Studio Theatre, Bonds began to shift a staple of her work—the marriage of intimate spaces and expansive emotions—in small but distinct ways. Opening on a sibling reunion, The Wolfe Twins starts as an examination of relational ties between family and friends (not to mention a beguiling stranger) and morphs into a meditation on the darkness that love of any kind can lead us into. This combination of small circumstances writ simultaneously large and lived-in has one of Bonds’ trademarks, garnering her comparisons to Annie Baker and Chekhov, among others.

Bonds’ more recent plays explore what happens when people feel as if they don’t have a center—when extenuating circumstances bear down and complicate an imagined future. Sundown, Yellow Moon (2017, with songs by folk duo The Bengsons), whose debut production at Ars Nova was praised by the New York Times and The New Yorker, showed a similar curiosity for people who feel disconnected and out of touch. Bonds trained her keen sensitivity on those familiar sensations of displacement and reinvigorated them with subtlety, nuance, and characters who long to call a place, any place, home.

Bonds’ latest work, Curve of Departure, which will receive its world premiere at South Coast Rep before its East Coast premiere in Studio’s 2017-2018 Main Series Season, showcases her trademark ear for character but along identity intersections—of race, religion, sexuality, and class. Set in a tiny motel room in New Mexico, the play follows one family as it faces down a funeral, chronic illness, and complications about who to accept into the family fold. Throughout the play, subtext is key; indeed, as Bonds explained, such subtlety is central to her work. “It’s one of the main components of my plays,” she said. “I write and do so much by ear. It’s about how it hits me—how it sounds, the rhythm of it.” Her current writing explores just how attuned to the world any of us can claim to be, and the consequences of such attunement in the stories we tell about ourselves and to each other.

For Bonds, accumulating new focuses and commitments as a playwright is part of the craft. Referring to writing as “an athletic event,” she described her process in terms of the runs she goes on: “You have to be patient with yourself. You have to know [when to say] ‘I’m going to push myself.’” It’s the push that often leads to growth, to the discovery “that something got broken open.” Bonds uses her careful, generous probing to take us closer to the wreck, to recognize what got broken as, in part, ours—not only to mourn, but also to reclaim, and ultimately rebuild.

—Sarah Cooke