An interview with Rachel Jendrzejewski

The Playwrights’ Center’s 2015-16 Ruth Easton New Play Series continues January 11 & 12 with ENCYCLOPEDIA by Core Writer Rachel Jendrzejewski. Associate Artistic Director Hayley Finn talked to Rachel about how she will be working with music during her workshop, the role of grief in the play, and her love of cross-discipline collaborations.

ENCYCLOPEDIA’s two characters’ names both mean moon in different languages, and the structure of the play mirrors the phases of the moon. What about the moon inspired the piece?

Initially, I started writing this piece in a very intuitive, associative way. I was doing a lot of writing, not toward telling a particular story, but approaching it in a chiseling way: chiseling and seeing what play might reveal itself. I tend to tell people this piece is expressionistic. It’s less about telling one action-based or plot-based story, and more about swimming through an expression. 

Moon imagery entered in early on and I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. But over the course of writing it definitely came to take on different meanings. Both of the characters are female, and of course the moon is often associated with a feminine spirit or energy. There’s also a lot I’m exploring with domestic labor and grief and processing, and the ambiguous lines between being “stable” and “not stable” mentally. The moon is historically a symbol relating to many of those things. Plus there are physical forces at play between the moon and various cycles on earth. So it entered in an associative way that ultimately related to different themes I was exploring. 

It also gave me a structure early on that I started writing into. I started thinking in terms of cycles and vignettes. I’m on the email list for an observatory, so I was getting emails every week about what was actually happening with the moon and the different phases it was going through. I found those emails really evocative as I wrote. The moon is both a very concrete, stable thing, and a very mysterious thing, so I was interested in that juxtaposition—the stabilizing force of it, but also the mystery it evokes. 

Grief is so beautifully expressed in this piece. Can you talk about about the role grief plays for these characters?

Well, I’m very interested in the challenge of creating characters that can mean different things to different audience members. Like with this play, it’s a very specific world in some ways. And it is a specific situation in some ways. But depending on what you’re bringing into the room, you can project different back stories into it or have different interpretations of the characters’ relationship. It’s intriguing to me to keep those possibilities open without getting totally ambiguous—to walk that fine line of just enough specificity, just enough clear intent, tugging against the play’s more expansive dream logic. I’m not attached to the details of the loss of the character in the play, to what “happened.” I’m much more interested in looking out on a landscape with her, as she’s going through a grieving process. What’s evoked from that strange state and from the waiting that has to happen? Our culture doesn’t make a lot of time for contemplation. So how can we create space, in performance, where we can sit with these sorts of questions for a little bit?

One of the things that struck me in the play is the juxtaposition of silence and loud noises. There are moments that are really quiet in the play and then suddenly there will be TV static or loud clanging of pots and pans. A marching band. Can you talk about those strong dynamics and the role of sound in the piece? 

I think I’ve always approached writing more like music than literature. I grew up doing a lot of music, so a musical sensibility carried over when I started writing. I’m always thinking about rhythm and how words flow and sound. Language as sound and not just as words with meaning. Language with pliable meaning, just as music is pliable, in a sense. 

There’s also something about the stillness of grief, the waiting, that we were talking about. I often have these strong images of being underwater and what sound is like underwater. Like there’s this loud, often overwhelming outside world, but if you go underwater, it all becomes faint and you can start to hear and sort through your own thoughts. That’s a feeling or a sense that was very strongly with me as I was writing. If you dip underwater, and venture back up into the world, and you dip back under, and venture back up…there’s something about that, how that sounds, that reminds me of sitting with something that you’ve lost and then trying to move forward doing whatever you have to do. Going back to work, making small talk. But then remembering in those small cracks of the day that something is different, dipping underwater for a second. But then needing to snap out of it and move on. That kind of push and pull, engaging with the world and—not necessarily disengaging, but tuning into your reality, listening and making space for it.

In this workshop, you’ll work with adding music into the piece and making music more integral. How did you decide that’s what the piece needed?

When I first was developing this play, that was not part of the conversation at all. I was figuring out the world of it through language. Then I sat on it for a long time after the initial development period. I just knew there was something missing and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I had a reading of it in Los Angeles, where it was directed by Shishir Kurup. It was part of a Padua Playwrights reading series and there were a couple musicians around who were playing for other readings in the series. At the last minute, Shishir roped them into also playing for this piece. We had one very fast and furious rehearsal where he just had them improvising. He would say, “a little more of that here; a little less of that here.” Orchestrating it on the fly, as he’s also directing the play. It was amazing and it made me really start thinking about the relationship between this piece and music. Because it wasn’t just about scoring it and having this layer of sound behind it, but about how the music was in real dialogue with the text. That was super exciting to me. 

So I’ve heard this play once with sound in a way that was very quick, and now I would love to have some more concentrated time to dig back into it with an eye toward how music is in conversation with the text itself. I’m really excited about my collaborators. They’re not writing music that belongs to the play after this. The idea is that the music could be different from production to production. It can even be totally different styles of music. But I want to figure out where and how it might be a voice, and how to script that, or to what extent that should be scripted.

Are there other things you’re looking at in the workshop? 

Music is the big focus. But another reason I have been sitting on this play for a while is that, you know, it has these strong female themes and it’s also dealing with grief. So it is very easy, I think, for people to initially assume I’m dealing with a sentimental or stereotypical version of femininity that I’m not actually that interested in. I’m aware that I have a lot of domestic labor imagery in the play, a woman cooking and cleaning, which is quickly interpreted as “housewife.” But I’m interested in the contemporary version of that labor. After all, washing dishes and sweeping are large parts of my life, and I’m as far away from “housewife” as you can get. So I’m curious about what those rituals mean today that is different from setting this play in the ‘50s or something. I’m also interested in very fluid ideas of what femininity is, or means. So during the workshop I’d like to revisit these very nuanced dynamics and how they are functioning in the piece. 

Many of your collaborators are not from the theater world. They’re dancers or visual artists or a band. Can you talk a little bit about why you picked these collaborators to come in and work with you on your piece?

Over time I have found that collaborating with people who don’t necessarily have the same vocabulary as I do can be really rich and interesting. We’re constantly having to define our terms together and make up the rules for how we’re going to work together. I find that to be a really rich process. 

I also love working with fellow theatermakers; I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And sometimes really exciting things can happen when you have more of a shorthand, the same vocabulary. Sometimes you can go deeper. But I think it can also be easy to fall into habits and comfortable places. Working with artists outside of the “field” of theater is constantly challenging me not to get comfortable, and pushing my work into different places that I wouldn’t have been able to anticipate.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I might note that Emily Mendelsohn, who’s coming out to direct, is someone I’ve admired from afar for a long time, but have never been able to work with in this capacity. When the opportunity came up, I started thinking about “who are those people that I wouldn’t normally be able to afford to pay and bring out and work with?” She’s one of them. I’m very excited to have a chance to work with her, and so grateful for this opportunity overall.

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