Rachel Bonds built Jonah like a puzzle box, a kind of inverse to Paula Vogel’s The Mother Play that Studio produced last fall. In The Mother Play, narrator Martha takes the threads of her family history, her conflicting feelings about her eponymous mother, and tries to weave them into a story that will hold the breadth of the love, anger, and ambivalence of their relationship. Martha addresses the audience, enlists us as judge and jury and most critically as witnesses to the impossible task she has set herself.
Jonah plays out in a quieter and more intimate key, but is likewise alive to the slippery nature of memory and time. Jonah finds its main character Ana slipping through her life—we see her as a teenager, we see her in college, we see her a decade later as a writer on fire—serving as her own silent judge and jury for the events that Bonds keeps just off stage for most of the play. It is a play, like so many of Bonds’s works, that plays out in inference and subtlety, as the audience catches up to the things Ana isn’t telling—and may not be truly telling herself.
Bonds has left tripwires for her characters and audience both, and to share too much of the mystery would be to rob the play of its dramaturgy of accretion and insights. In the essay that serves as the lobby display for the play, Bonds shares that the play grew from her reaction to from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, an instinct that resurfaced during the Kavanagh confirmation hearings. “I watched as Dr. Ford recounted what had happened to her all those years ago,” Bonds writes. “A young, bright, frightened girl with a boy’s hand over her mouth. I started thinking about my own sexual history. It was like watching The Sixth Sense again after figuring out that Bruce Willis is dead, understanding that there was a ghost lurking there the whole time, suddenly all my memories turned shadowy, eerie.”
Using the theatrical language of a thriller—sudden light shifts, long shadows, disorienting sound—Jonah follows Ana as she navigates the edges of intimacy and trust, looking for a way back into a kind of joy, a kind of power, an experience of God that she once held in her body. “The world has changed a thousand times and a thousand times again since I wrote that first draft [of Jonah],” writes Bonds. “But I continue to return to the play. Because it’s a story of deep hurt and survival. About female desire, rage, ingenuity, resilience. About how the thing that hurts you can also save you.”
If you are coming to this note after seeing the play and looking for Rachel’s perspective, I recommend this interview, where she discusses the structure and some of the plot reveals of Jonah.