Jaclynn Jutting

Lucy Kirkwood’s MOSQUITOES reminds us that we are all particles on our own disparate paths through time and space. It’s a play that fuses science with the nuclear family, addressing the dynamics of our world—both the cosmic macro and micro reality of our relationships with each other. Some of these characters, like us, are driven by a need to know how the universe fits together and our place in it. Others need to be able to pick up a phone and connect when we are the most scared or alone—to know that we have someone on the other end who listens to our greatest fears and the songs we create. Who stands alongside us in birthing the moments and miracles that we know are rare, but possible.

For the science community, locating the existence of the Higgs Boson in 2008 was one of those rare births. Its existence validated life-long careers and explained how we are all connected through time and space—our past, present and our future. This God’s particle is responsible—as the 16-year old Luke tells us—for giving us mass. In the same way that our relationships—whether it be with a fellow artist, a sibling, a lover or a parent—are what give us mass and our lives meaning. The truth about this spectacular long-awaited particle is the discovery that it, like us, is capable of decay. It can split. When we enter the ATLAS control room with these scientists, we stand with them at the brink of what is next in our ability to achieve, to theorize, to wonder?

It’s this portentous moment that Lucy Kirkwood seems interested in. The possibility of the miracle but also our own capacity for self-destruction. What I love about this play is that it asks us to consider what could split us? What could split a marriage or a country? Because the matriarch of this play is right, the world is held together by fundamental forces, but our model of existence also includes the Weak Force. Things and people can and do fall apart.

The Boson knows these forces too well. He is our guide through the past, equipped with the knowledge of its impacts on our future. We, like the play’s characters, are indeed a fractured people and public. Occasionally in our families, certainly in our countries. As we stand at this fork in the road, a part of the chain reaction of human existence, Lucy Kirkwood’s MOSQUITOES asks us to consider the impact of the individual’s life choices on us all.

-Jaclynn Jutting, Director. Steep Theatre, Fall 2019.

Empowerment.  It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, and depending on your point of view, we could be in a time of empowerment—for women, people of color and our LGBT brothers and sisters—or we could be existing in a vacuum where the same old, same old happens once more.  It’s tricky to determine our agency as women because empowerment is literally defined as a process.  It is a process of becoming stronger and confident, of claiming one’s own rights and agency as people.  And this process, much like growth, is two steps forward, one step back.

THE WOLVES, the Pulitzer-prize nominated play by Sarah DeLappe, focuses on a window in our lives where we start to make major choices about the kind of people we want to be, a time when survival of the fittest is the greatest: high school.  In the seemingly protective bubble of a suburban indoor soccer team, these characters exist in a time of incubation.  Within this pack and these conversations, identity is explored, and boundaries are tested over the course of this 90 minute play— the duration of a soccer game—as these women train each other for the game of life.  

They speak up (which I admire) and advocate for themselves.  As a total confession, it’s the way in which they speak that makes me so excited to direct this play.  They alternately challenge, support, and call each other out—literally coaching each other and scrimmaging with their ideas and a soccer ball to work out what they value, who they want to be.  They are trying to build themselves into the best version they can possibly be and defy limits that have already been set too narrow for them in this life.

On Sarah DeLappe’s bench is a roster of women—fierce athletes, students, women who are juggling the world with each pass, the way we do.  At first glance, they seem young.  It is tempting to write them off as children, but these 9 players are complex.  They are already dealing with real issues. Their hopes, insecurities and goals are relevant and incredibly identifiable.  

Maybe like me, you see yourself reflected in their competitive spirit and what they want for themselves from the game of life.  Which player do you identify with?  Maybe it’s #11, who just wants to soak up the world, do it all and advocates justice with the “right” stance or shot.  Maybe it’s #13, and like her, you just want a moment in the limelight, soaking up the roar of the crowd.  Or maybe it’s #46, and like her, you just wants to fit in and belong.  

Maybe you, like them, just want to win.  

Which brings us to The Opposition.  Our play is set in January 2017.  The present really, and upon closer reflection, it’s an auspicious month. It’s a month that marks the inauguration of a new president.  It’s the month of the Muslim travel ban, where blatant US discrimination is sent to our courts for determination as to the legality of intolerance.  Between stretches and the blow of a whistle, Sarah DeLappe inserts a discussion of human liberties—from twitter in China to Cambodian dictators to the Preamble ofSchool House Rocks.  Within the safe bubble of an indoor soccer field in Suburban America— this high school girls soccer team continuously returns to the idea of oppression.  Which, in this place of privilege in the greatest country on earth, begs the question of why?

Sarah DeLappe’s response is her words.   Both the acknowledgement that the women of the world may be under assault and our response.   WE ARE THE WOLVES.  WE ARE THE WOLVES.  WE ARE THE WOLVES.  Because these women will acknowledge these injustices, injuries and losses and they will move past them.  They will defy them.  Just like we all will.

 “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”   - Helena (Act 1, Scene 1)  

 When I picked up A Midsummer Night’s Dream to start work on this classic, one of the first things that rose from the page was Shakespeare’s exploration of the variants of love.  Everywhere I looked was love: lovers forged by the necessity of state and peace, young lovers, jealous lovers, the love between sisters and comrades, the mistaken love of a queen who literally wakes up in love with an ass, and a play-within-a-play created by amateur artists, who depict the ends one would go to for love.

Historically rumored to be written by Shakespeare to celebrate the nuptials of Elizabethan nobles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream calls upon a holiday derived from the pagans, which celebrated a singular night of the year when young lovers would sleep and dream of their true love.  For me, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the act of falling in love, a powerful, encompassing bit of magic.  It is a force of nature:  both jointly irrefutably true and powerful, but also can prove, occasionally and painfully, to be an illusion. 

The Greeks called love, “the madness of the Gods” because of the effects of love on the beloved.  Set in Nashville’s Centennial park, next to our own Parthenon, Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s anniversary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings Shakespeare’s fairy-filled Athens to “the Athens of the South.”  In a contemporary blend of 2018 and ancient Greece, A Midsummer’s Night Dream explores the conflict between 4 couples of lovers—young and old, worldly and magical.   This powerful exploration of the centrifugal force of love is an old as the Greek myths of Ovid but as relevant to us today. 

 With a bit of music and imagination, we hope you enjoy this play about love.  It is the dream that we want to be ensnared in.  Powerful, magical and life altering, A Midsummer Night’s Dream explores the uncontrollable nature of love.

Jaclynn Jutting

Director, Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

$16,500.  That’s Rose and Sam’s annual salary, working 40/hours a week for $8.25.  Annie Baker’s play THE FLICK is a movie for film buffs—full of yo-yos, hip hop dancing and laughter.  But it’s also a play about the betrayal of one’s dreams, and the challenge of pursuing your dreams at $8.25/hour.

In this Pulitzer-prize winning play, Annie Baker is speaking to the youth of America.  We live in a time where lack of opportunity (or the perception of its absence) is a dangerous reality for several characters in the play.  I think these characters have all endured the world’s micro-aggressions over the course of their young lives—whether it be lack of money, encouragement or opportunity, their struggles with mental illness, abandonment or racism.  And as they get older, it’s getting harder and harder to dream. 

In the middle of this cynical world, a 20-year old Avery is struggling to hold onto his faith that people, dreams and art won’t let you down.  This is a faith that I share, even as I also know that sometimes it doesn’t work out, despite the best intentions and doing everything right. 

I think if we sat here long enough, we could all connect with this adversity that we’ve encountered in our own lives.   In the same way we’d encounter the truth, that occasionally, we attain our dreams, or at least one of them.  Even if it is fleeting.   This play presents the duality of both truths.  And these characters, much like real life, often play a role in each other’s hopes and dreams (however buried) for their own lives.

Dreams are absolutely possible whether you make $8.25/hour, less or more.  But it is certainly a lot harder.  I’m grateful for this play about the movies that tells the story of 4 young people—who sweeping up popcorn between the credits—try to not to lose hope for themselves or their fellow man in the face of poverty, racism and encroaching cynicism.  I’m incredibly excited share with you Annie Baker’s THE FLICK, a story about these young people trying to combat disillusionment and occasionally daring to hope that people, dreams and art won’t let you down.

Jaclynn Jutting

Verge Theater, June 2018

“This was our 9/11.”  --Amish Leader

On October 2, 2006, Carl Charles Roberts, a local milk truck driver walked into an Amish school to even the score with God. 

Some of you may remember this day and shooting vividly.  For others, you may have been just a child—Velda’s age actually—so you remember it through the lens of childhood.  For me, I wish I remember it better.  In the 10 years between then and now, it’s become a bit vague in my mind, eclipsed by other shootings:  Columbine, Sandy Hook, a movie theater in Colorado, Virginia TECH, Paris, and Orlando.  The shooting of 10 little girls in an Amish school has become a distant memory that now lives in the echo of too many other tragedies. 

For the characters of this play, the violence wasn’t distant.  It was personal.  It walked down the aisle of the grocery store in which they shopped, it lived a street over from their house, and it sat at their kitchen table.  This play is about the intimacy of violence and the difficulty of reconciling that violence—our ability to hurt each other and do terrible things—when it is close to us or even lives within us.  This incident makes them ask some hard questions: how do we move on after a violation has occurred in our midst?  And for some of them, how they might they have contributed to the conditions that led to this man entering an Amish schoolhouse and opening fire?

Ten girls were shot that day; 6 people died (5 girls and one man), but all the people of this play were impacted by the ripple effect of violence that stemmed from one ill man in their midst.  He was their neighbor, their husband, and a member of the community.  He was one of them and could be one of us.  How do we wrap our minds around the fact that the neighbor sitting or living next to us might do the same? 

For the characters in Jessica Dickey’s fictionalized accounting of a very real tragedy, these questions echo our own.  These unique and distinct people share the story of their lives and their town but also the complexity of our ability as people to both enact violence against each other but also to extend the absolution found in forgiveness. 

Thirty members of the Amish community attended Charles Carl Roberts’ funeral on an October morning 10 years ago.  They sat with his wife, they contributed money to his funeral and his kids’ futures.  The grace and forgiveness of the Amish of Lancaster country, PA is inspiring.  It is certainly an illustration of God’s love and absolution on this earth, and it is the only rebuttal to the kind of violence we see too often in our communities.  I have to believe that it is as powerful as the crime that warranted it.  That it is not only a balm of comfort but an absolution for us all that enables us to keep moving forward, one foot in front of another when we encounter pain and hate from our neighbor.

It’s easy to ask, “How could someone do this?”  I believe this story offers a powerful, complex response.  THE AMISH PROJECT makes me consider my own ability to lash out and hurt another.  But it also offers something redemptive: that the greatest gift we might be able to offer each other as humans is understanding, comfort and forgiveness.  That is the amazing grace might ultimately lead us home.

Sam Hunter’s THE WHALE may be one of my favorite plays.  This play first caught my eye when I noticed it in a play’s program—that it was story about a 600-lbs man trying to reconnect with his daughter when his health takes a turn for the worse.  For me, the thing that captured my attention was that it was about a family and featured a 600-lbs gay man.  A person whose story often isn’t told.

For Charlie, his weight is visible evidence of life failures and heartbreak.  His guilt and shame over choices that he made in the past have resulted in him turning to food to bury his pain.  Perhaps this is something that resonates with you as it does with me—and one doesn’t have to look far to find a family member dealing with a chosen vice in an effort to diminish their demons.  It’s incredibly difficult to watch someone that we love make destructive choices in their life because of their pain.  It’s intolerable to see someone not recognize their own gifts and what they offer to us because they have given up on life and themselves.  But it happens all the time.  And lives that are precious to those who love them are wasted.

Love is powerful.  It offers forgiveness and second chances.  It offers redemption.  As a Christian artist, THE WHALE moves me “because it makes me think about my own life” and the power of redemptive love and forgiveness to save a person’s life.  I hope it does the same for you.  We offer you THE WHALE.

Director's Note:

Ironically, when I was a youth, I hated THE SEAGULL.  I found the language old fashioned.  When I read, "I am the seagull" I stumbled over the words.  They seemed clunky and heavy-handed.  Then one day, in an acting class, I watched two fellow actors (who consequently, were lovers) perform the final scene between Constantine and Nina.  It was heartbreaking and unforgettable.

I discovered this translation by Christopher Hampton a few years ago when looking for work for my students.  His writing, partnered with Chekhov's ideas, is inarguably beautiful.  I was drawn to the plight of the young.  In this play one generation seems to be looking across the lake at the other, longing to be in each other's shoes.  In Act one, Constantine speaks to his uncle about visiting Arkadina's salon, jammed full of talented, seasoned writers and artists.  He speaks of "when those actors and writers in her drawing room would turn their kind attention to me, it always seemed to me from their expressions that they were just gauging my insignificance."  It is a line that resonates because I've felt like Constantine.  Perhaps as artists, we all have.  It's easy to feel insignificant when you are young, when you feel like you are standing on the periphery holding something precious--whether it's talent, passion or simply a single dream for yourself--cupped in your hands.

The precariousness of this youthful, restless longing for significance or summit towards what we most long for is felt with increasing sympathy and urgency as I age.  Time has taught me how valuable those cupped hopes are to who we are and become, as we age.

There are a multitude of names for dreams that people in this play hold on to:  significance, aspirations for one's art--to create something grand enough in which we can lose our smallness and our mortality.  For others, they long for a return to youth, a chance to redo small and large disappointments and touch a time when possibilities seemed infinite, before they were winnowed down.  Some want love.  Others, good sex.  And for a few, they are looking for renewed belief and the ability to view the world as though anything might be possible--that our horizon might be free of failure or the sense that we could fall.

"Time passes so quickly." Polina says.  "Youth."  Dorn replies.  Both utterances are wistful longings form people and families who desperately want to be happy. Fifteen years later, in the here and now, I am deeply moved by Chekhov's play about the threat of life's reduction of our dreams. 

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Author's Note:

What I believe:  In the work of a master playwright like Chekhov, there is a world in each moment, in each gesture and exchange.  And when a given moment is lifted from the play and set aside, it continues to resonate with life.  Such are the vibrant passions of Chekhov's people and the universal predicaments he has handed them.  He does nothing less than confront his character--and his audience--with the fundamentals of life: love, loss, hope, regret, dreams and death.

Having been approached several years ago about writing a new adaptation of THE SEAGULL, I immersed myself in the play.  And what I found surprised me:  I could not get the final scene between Treplev and Nina out of my mind.  In fact, I could not focus on the heart of the play at all.  I was mesmerized by the magnitude of this single fateful encounter.  And so, these "variations" were born.

We are, too often, silent on the "fundamentals."  We have a rich language for complaint and provocation but fall strangely mute in the face of lost love.  Or quiet delight.  The rich ache of daily life.  And when the moment passes--we are left only with "parking lot wit":  useless, retroactive wisdom about what we should have said or done instead.

The stage is that place where second chances are granted; where the tiny slights and cruel evasions which haunt our relations with others can be amended, rethought, overcome.  The stage gives us one more chance to throw open the door and say what's in our heart.  And so, by granting Nina and Treplev numerous attempts to express the fundamentals, perhaps we will find a way to voice our own.

--Steven Dietz

Director's Note:

There is a line in this play that haunts me.  It's in Variation 34, when Nina tries to once again replay a winter evening in 1898.  When she and Constantine arrive, yet again, at failure to say the words differently, better, she turns to him and says, "I'd like to come in again."

I understand the impulse.  That sentence makes me think of the times and moments in my own life that I'd like to replay. Where I'd like to come in again.  Before a decision was made, words flew from my mouth.  What if we could change a moment that affected the trajectory of our lives?

Constantine's right: this play isn't about forms, it's about the trying to find the right words and honoring an impulse that wants to touch a moment and rewrite it to emerge differently.  It's about the chance to say, play or exist in time anew--to find a variation, if you will--so that perhaps, things could end differently.

What are the right words to keep the greatest love of your life from walking out into the night, ready to board a train to Yelets--a walking, talking shell of lost dreams, love and youth?  What are the right words that give us reprieve, that might keep a cynical young writer form spending a full 2 minutes tearing up manuscripts before walking out of the room and shooting himself in the head?

In this play, this final scene from Act 4 of THE SEAGULL becomes so instrumental and large in the lives on these pages, that I can't help but think that if Nina did indeed survive, she would be haunted by this moment 20 years later and the 20 years beyond that.

Nina and Constantine are two of the greatest tragic characters of all times.  In their struggle to hold onto the hope found in youth, love and art, I am aware of my own grappling for those same things.  It's a desire that warrants 44 scenes that defy the boundaries of time in this play of love, art and endurance.

Polly Teale's BRONTE has been a play that has captivated me for years.  After the Bible, Jane Eyre is the second most commonly read book in the English language.  Perhaps each one of you can remember where you were the first time you read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and encountered the characters of Jane, Heathcliff, Bertha and Cathy. I read them both in my youth, when their stories kept me up, reading long into the night, because I couldn't get enough.  Their writing, in their home by candlelight, longing for imagined lovers touched me, across time and nationality.  Their words are immortal.

It's hard to imagine these books were written by three plain women, with little money to their name, occupying the only positions available to them at the time:  governess and homemaker.  Three distinct voices wrote for different reasons.  To be heard, to change the world, to interrogate the darker nature of man and woman, but ultimately were united in that they wrote the world around them, inspired by the relationships with their father, brother and each other. 

A transcendental event occurred when these three women challenged each other to defy the expectations of their portion in life.  When they reached beyond the confines of the rules pertaining to gender, economic status, and religion to imagine a world where they could write and exist as people.  In this story of one family, we see brother and sisters, raised side by side, encounter the burden of expectation put upon us when we leave childhood behind.  When I look at their work, I know our now has been affected by their lives, work and pen.  It's a story that feels as relevant today, as we consider both then and now and the world we imagine for our children and ourselves.

Director's Note:

When we look up from the history books and consider our role in WWII, we think of ourselves as heroes.  To the Japanese, we were simply conquerors.  Kobo Abe's THE GHOST IS HERE was written in the years following the defeat of Japan and subsequent occupation by the US, when the identity of a country was altered forever in the moment an atomic mushroom cloud engulfed Hiroshima.

On August 14, 1945 Emperor Hirohito took the airwaves for the first time to address his people.  Citizens of Japan huddled around radios among the rubble and in their homes to hear their leader pronounce that "Despite the best that has been done by everyone...Japan has resolved to pave the way for the grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable."

When MacArthur stepped out of the airplane onto Japanese soil, he did so without a tie, shirt sleeves rolled up.  With his arrival, Tokyo Rose stepped away from the microphone to be replaced by the Andrew Sisters.  Whiskey sat next to sake in the bars, and Western dress and comic books invaded a Japanese culture and people searching for what it meant to be a Japanese citizen.

In the opening moments of THE GHOST IS HERE--in a scene reminiscent of a Sin City comic book--rain is falling on the occupied bridge above Oba, a petty thief, who like many of these characters, has wandered far from home.  When he meets the war veteran Fukagawa--who sees the ghost of his dead wartime buddy--Oba sees the opportunity at capital and reinvention.  Kobo Abe's play is filled with song, dance and a great deal of humor but it is ultimately a play about survivors in a land of lost dreams--attempting to piece together the fragments, photographs and echoes of their past to forge a new future.

Sixty-five years after WWII, I believe we too live in a nation far from a time when my grandfather returned home a hero.  We pick up the paper only to be reminded that the stock market is simply the sale of illusions, retirements can disappear in a moment and jobs can end.  Like Fukagawa, I feel like we don't live in the land of heroes but rather of fallen giants. Kobo Abe's play was born out of a Japanese history and culture, and here in Chicago in 2012, I believe THE GHOST IS HERE is a play about Japan and the unseen ghost that occupied them. We too are at the crossroads when the moment of reinvention lies before us.  If we are no longer heroes, who are we?