There is a quiet courage in Rachel Bonds’ writing — an insistence that even the most minute moment of human connection is significant and worthy of theatrical magnification. Rather than strike her audiences with lightning, she electrifies the stage with brooding, sizzling rumbles of thunder. With language that hums with vulnerability and imagery that glows from within, Bonds illustrates the power—and complexity—of explicating the interior life of human relationships. She elevates intimacy and contradictory behavior, sketching the inner lives of her characters with brushstrokes of precision and depth. Repeatedly, she returns to one elemental truth: relationships are messy, contradictory, and utterly essential to the human experience.
In Swimmers (2018), Bonds examines the peculiar emotional distance within physical closeness—the strange limbo of workplace relationships. The play follows the lives of eleven employees at a sales company who struggle with various personal challenges including death, sexual harassment, divorce, alcoholism, and unrequited love; the setting shifts between the home and the office, comparing the external and internal lives of each character and scrutinizing the absurdity of surface-level relationships. At the office, people orbit one another, locked in routine and habit, yet remain strangers in many important ways. The play grew from a place of personal isolation and fear—Bond’s personal desire to connect in the face of uncertainty. She says of Swimmers, “I wrote for people I don’t get to see enough of... I... wanted to challenge myself to write for people who are not me... [t]hat being said, all eleven have some aspect of me in them... there is always some seed of understanding between us.” In this act of imaginative empathy, Bonds drew detailed and specific portraits of shared longing: for purpose, for meaning, for one another. What emerges is a chorus of humanity—flawed, quiet, reaching. The drama is not loud or sensational. It lives in the interior, in what she calls “small, internal shifts”—those subtle pivots of heart and mind that make up the real substance of change.
Bonds has a rare gift for mapping emotional terrain and trauma-ridden inner lives without sentimentality. Her characters do not reveal themselves to an audience immediately; they unravel on stage in swirling conversations filled with half-truths, indescribable feelings, and imperfect impulses. Their emotions come faltering and tripping into the light, with undeniable honesty and authenticity. Her craft is on full display in The Wolfe Twins (2014), a Studio-commissioned play about siblings who have grown apart and are forced to confront who they’ve become—and who they still are to each other. Set in Rome, under the shadow of myth and memory, the play pulses with awkwardness and tenderness. It’s about how easy it is to let people become fixed in your mind—and how hard it is to let them change. It is also, quietly, a play about grief: the grief of lost time, of fading closeness, of childhood versions of ourselves we no longer recognize. Grief, Bonds says, is the through-line between her work, and was born out of the loss of her father, who suffered from chronic illness most of his, and Bonds’s, life. She says of her father, “He died when I was in college... it happened at a moment when I was really coming into my own as a writer… I was like, ‘Oh, I want to do this,’ and [his death] really impacted me… I write a lot about grief; that tends to be a theme. I can’t get away from it no matter how hard I try.”
Bonds' subjects are often deeply personal—grief, siblinghood, desire, doubt—without feeling autobiographical. Through her writing she explores and attempts to understand her feelings through imaginative characters that stray far from her specific experiences. She is a bona fide storyteller, crafting specific worlds and fictional characters from nonfictional, personal realities. Raised in the small college town of Sewanee, Tennessee, Bonds grew up as an outsider— a part of a Jewish family living in the heart of the Bible Belt. Her mom raised her on the love of literature, taking her to the library and encouraging her to respect and love the art of the writer. Growing up as an avid reader and a cultural outsider, she says, taught her to observe and listen, and has gifted her with a deep knowledge of human behavior and a desire to connect. Her distance from others became her lens, and her plays are shaped by this gaze: tender but unflinching, empathetic but never naive. She writes with the full weight of her own emotional history, but she also writes outward—toward people whose stories are unlike hers, yet still familiar in the ways that matter most. Across her several specific worlds, she creates through-lines of loss and love, the strange intimacy of family, the ache of growing apart, and the quiet triumph of learning to begin again.
Her artistic process is imbued with a sense of urgency and intuition, she says, calling her method “writing forward”, which, she explains, “means I start at what I think is the beginning of a play, whatever comes out. I just keep going and going forward and I don't look back. I write until I get to an end.” Her process reflects one’s experience when they are aching to find solace in the ocean of their emotions, with ongoing discovery, exploration, and openness to the unknown and unexpected. She writes in a raw, continuous flow, trusting that clarity will come later. Each play, she says, is its own living animal, with its own hunger and temperament. She follows where it leads. The results are plays that embody—in content, form, and dialogue—the emotion they are attempting to understand. There is an emotional precision to Bonds’ dialogue—a rhythm of hesitation, interruption, silence. Her characters speak in half-formed thoughts and almost-confessions. What goes unsaid matters as much, if not more, as what is voiced. She finds poetry in awkwardness and reminds us of the sacred humanity in stumbling. This is not accidental. Bonds, an observer at heart, listens carefully to the way people speak when they’re trying not to fall apart. Her plays are full of these moments—frail, flickering, utterly honest.
That same subtle yet searing emotional language defines Jonah (2024), a play that dives into the tangled space between trauma and trust. Bonds began the play during a tumultuous time in her life and the world’s—during her first pregnancy, which coincided with the upheaval of the 2016 election. A national conversation about gender, power, and consent became an invitation to reexamine her own history, to confront relationships long dismissed or rewritten. The play grew into a vessel for those realizations—a way to explore the deep scars left by a culture that teaches women to silence their own instincts, to swallow pain and laugh it off. But Jonah is not only a play about trauma. It is also about survival. About the revolutionary act of trusting again. In this exploration of resilience and tenderness, Bonds poses a radical question: How can a woman be powerful without losing her capacity to love?
In all her work, Rachel Bonds honors this radical act of connection. Her plays ask: How does one stay open when it would be easier to close off? How does one honor the people they love, in all their complexity, contradiction, and confusion? How does one genuinely connect, and grow, and change? She doesn’t offer her audience easy answers; there is no deus ex machina of lightning-shattering perception that shows the audience the way. Only the stumbling rumbles of thunder produced by characters who try—who fail and try again. And in that trying, Bonds gives us something exquisite: the echo of our own lives, not grand or heroic, but deeply, recognizably human.
—Ella Talerico