Studio was set to premiere Jonah in our 2020-2021 season; we cancelled our production in the wake of COVID shutdowns and Jonah premiered at Roundabout Theatre in New York in 2024.
The following is an excerpt from Rachel’s artist statement to the NEA in support of Studio’s 2020 application for funding.
I wrote most of Jonah in a kind of fever of five days I stole away from home, away from my toddler and domestic responsibilities, closed in a sunlit bedroom at an artist retreat in Brewster, NY. I had applied to be there to write a screenplay. But Jonah emerged instead. It was burning inside of me, so I let it out, typing furiously for hours in my bed, gloriously alone and single-focused for a few days.
The play had been living in me for a while. If I’m honest, the seed of it was probably planted during the election in 2016, when I was navigating pregnancy for the first time, fearful and excited, and the Washington Post released that video of “locker room talk.” How I naively thought for a moment it would ruin a man. And how I came to learn that it wouldn’t, and couldn’t, and was inconsequential to most of the country. And how that shook me. How it made me think back to all the locker room talk I’d heard over the years, all the locker room talk directed at me, or near me, how I had always swallowed and accepted it. How my body had lit up in flames inside, but my mind so quickly brushed it aside as normal, ridiculous, unavoidable. Just the way things are.
I started to think about how often my body and my mind were separated by these little comments—my body awash with rage and fear, and my mind flying, fleeing somewhere else to—I guess?—protect me. I thought about the stories I would tell myself to keep going, keep walking, keep getting up in the morning, to not just explode into a pile of burning ashes on a sidewalk. There’s a play in that somewhere, I thought. But I put it aside because I was having a baby and I had other, pressing projects on the horizon.
Then during the Kavanaugh hearings, the seed of the play resurfaced and sprouted into a thick, green shoot. I watched as Dr. Ford recounted what had happened to her all those years ago, a young, bright, frightened girl with a boy’s hand over her mouth, and I started thinking about my own sexual history. And 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.
I realized many of my first sexual experiences were more upsetting than I allowed myself to understand at the time. There had been a power imbalance in these encounters that I had told myself was all right. I had shaped them and reshaped them to make them seem all right, or if they weren’t, I had written in the narrative of my own fault to explain them away.
I looked at my husband, a man who I trust deeply, and I wondered, how did I arrive here? After being hurt by so many men, and not even close to the kind of pain some women have experienced, how have I come to trust this person? How has desire and intimacy saved me? I could have shut the door but I didn’t. How could a woman who has been through trauma far worse than mine trust again? How can she be with a man and maintain her power?
I took these questions to that artist’s residency and wrote Jonah. The play asks “How Can a Woman Be Powerful?”, and I think that is a question we should be asking ourselves on the heels of the 2020 election, no matter the outcome. I am also grateful to bring this play to Studio specifically, where I feel truly supported artistically, where I am given a place to be ambitious, to ask big questions, to see my work fully and immediately realized, and where I have access to some of the best, most nimble minds in the American theatre. On a practical level, Studio’s spaces are so deeply intimate, and to get to explore a play that is at its core about trust and intimacy, feels particularly exciting and fruitful.
The world has changed a thousand times and a thousand times again since I wrote that first draft. But I continue to return to it. 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.