#julia jarcho

[milksockets]

[wyszniewski]

The sound designer Ben Williams talks about the sonic elements that inspired his work on the play “The Terrifying,” at the Abrons Arts Center.

[wyszniewski]

A monster devours your sense of security in this scream-filled Julia Jarcho evisceration of classic horror movies at Abrons Arts Center.

[wyszniewski]

Playwright and director Julia Jarcho's The Terrifying — directed by the author and playing at Abrons Arts Center through April 2 — marks the debut production of her company, Minor Theater.

[repost-by-clsnyu]

Fall 2015 Semester in the Contemporary Literature Series

By Peter Tasca

In recent years, the department’s Contemporary Literature Series at NYU has been inviting contemporary authors onto campus and into the undergraduate classroom. Past authors have included novelists Mark Danielewski, Jonathan Franzen, and Zoe Heller, in addition to Pulitzer prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith. The CLS provides NYU students with the unique opportunity of not only seeing some of the most creative minds on the contemporary literature scene firsthand, but also learning about the distinctive ways in which these writers uniquely and individually engage with the artistic process.

This past semester, several English classes have been graced with a diverse company of artists, playwrights, writers, and filmmakers. Jill Magid sat in on Professor Mary Poovey’s Narrative Strategies Seminar; Sibyl Kempson led an exercise in Professor Julia Jarcho’s Advanced Playwriting Workshop; and Stanley Schtinter answered questions from students in Professor Sukhdev Sandhu’s Contemporary British Literature class. While the program originally placed each author in conversation with an English faculty member, the CLS has also recently begun to highlight the creative achievements of our faculty, with a poetry reading last fall by Professor Maureen McLane, and another in the spring by Prof. Thomas Urayoán Noel, inaugurating what will, with any luck, become a long­-standing tradition here at NYU.

This year, on November 2, the faculty spotlight was on Prof. Julia Jarcho who, accompanied by actors Jenny Seastone and Ben Williams, read from several of her plays. Both a playwright and director with the company Minor Theatre, Jarcho’s produced works include
 American Treasure (2009), Dreamless Land (2011), Nomads (2014), and Grimly Handsome (2013 & 2015), the winner of an Obie award for Best New American Play. Before the reading began, Jarcho was introduced by her friend and colleague Professor Wendy Lee, who started off her discussion by stating that Jarcho’s works “redeem literary criticism.” Although Professor Lee noted that Jarcho often receives positive reviews from theatre critics, many of them fail to testify to the complexity of her work. One need only glance at a selection of these reviews—“I can’t say I completely got Julia Jarcho’s one act ‘American Treasure,’ but I still liked it,” wrote one critic—to register the gap that Professor Lee addresses.

Offering a reading of her own, Professor Lee argued that the wicked and wacky subversiveness of Jarcho’s work comes from her deep concern with the notion of intimacy in all of its manifest forms. These include the intimacy of violence, the foreclosure of intimacy in
 unintelligibility, and the intimacy of the theater as a performative space. In an online interview with CLS fellow Gina Elbert the week before the reading, Jarcho encapsulated the paradoxical form of intimacy in her work by saying “if you asked me what theater does that no other art does, I might say it has something to do with letting a kind of violence emerge between language and reality.”

A dramatic reading turned out to suit this type of disruptive energy unexpectedly well. When we go see a play, we anticipate certain dramatic conventions. Even when these conventions are broken, we know they are being broken in the service of a performance. A reading, on the other hand, normally consists of a brief prologue or lecture in which the writer introduces and gives context for the following slice of the work. This lecture­ portion of a reading is not the performance of the material itself. In purporting to speak to us truthfully about how we are to receive the material, it observes the decorum of reality. But not in this case. Getting up in front of the podium, Prof. Jarcho promptly shouted “Romanticism!” It seems to be a lecture: “Let’s all get used to the word,” she continued, “Romanticism…” whereupon she slapped herself in the face, complaining about insects. “Romanticism, in the larval state, attaches to the skin. Chews on you a little and falls away. Normally. Once grown up, well: No longer a threat. No longer an…irritation.” Soon thereafter she made the blithe announcement: “You all look confused,” before lapsing into silence, as audience members’ heads turned and bodies began to shift uncomfortably in their seats.

But as the speeches developed, one realized that these performative gaps and hesitations formally double the philosophical issues Jarcho’s characters grapple with. Moreover, it became clear that the question of how one “correctly” stages a play is central to them. “If one wanted to make a piece of, let’s say, let’s say, anything,” Jarcho stuttered, “god demands that you do it as well as god would want you to do it. And since god himself is perfection itself, it follows, it follows—” Yet the divine syllogism for the “correct” way never arrives. The words hang suspended in stammering human mouths. “Because you see the assurance,” she continued in character, “that things are not that way, that there is no correct procedure, that in fact we—” before finally breaking off, allowing us to observe the ways in which performative incompleteness can act as a salve for its existential counterpart.

This is not to say, however, that Jarcho’s work is gloomy.Her bending of theatrical  rules demonstrates the idiosyncrasy of her zany wit as much as it provokes serious intellectual 
reflection. For instance, American Treasure, which deals with the irresponsible mythologization of Native Americans, was conceived, she told the audience with a straight face, because the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets upset her. The plot revolves around the search for a mysterious ancient being named the Hauntus, a macguffin which at once evokes the the traumatic history of Native American resettlement and sets up a punch­line for the contemporary character “Poca,” a tough ­talking antiques dealer who has sold her sister’s scalp. After performing a scene from this piece, Seastone and Williams shifted into a scene from Jarcho’s Grimly Handsome, in which—at least for the first act—two Slavic serial killers pose as Christmas tree salesmen. At another point in the reading, a poster behind Jarcho, advertising the CLS event, fell off the wall. Jarcho picked it up off the ground and, without missing a beat, declared, “That’s what you call iconoclasm.”

Observing the scenes from Jarcho’s work as well as the “character” that she played in introducing them, with her nervous tics and self-­conscious gestures strategically and theatrically on display, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp.” “Camp,” Sontag wrote, “sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” Similarly, the dramatic reading the audience was treated to was not really a dramatic reading at all, but a dramatic “reading.” By treating the “lecture” and the “reading” as genres to be played and tampered with, Jarcho’s work and sensibility profoundly exhibits the notion of camp Sontag described as “Being ­as ­playing ­a ­Role,” as “the farthest extension…of the metaphor of life as theater.”

[repost-by-clsnyu]

Pre-Event Interview with Julia Jarcho

Conducted by CLS Fellow Gina Elbert

1. Can you pick your top three favorite plays and explain how they have influenced you? A Murder of Crows by Mac Wellman, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks, and maybe Action by Sam Shepard. They all are written with insane precision.They celebrate deviance and they leave no quarter for any presumption that (a) there is such a thing as a normal life or (b) things are OK. They all have lines that will ring in your head forever through their incredible rhythmic composition. In different ways they all have lots of space in them, space for things to be funny and sad and weird. And in the midst of all this spaciousness you suddenly slam into these jolts of powerful feeling. So, that's what I'd like to do in my plays... 2. What is your favorite part about writing plays, as opposed to doing any other kind of writing? Events of speech are my favorite thing. Writing plays gives me a chance to live in that element: utterance as something that happens, and in happening unmakes us. Also, writing plays is (at least for me) a form that is self-evidently incomplete. I don't think I would write plays if I didn't also direct them. So in that sense writing a play is like writing a promissory note-- I don't really know what that is, but-- anyway writing a contract for a future collaboration. Less lonely than other forms of writing. 3. What is the writing process like for you? It varies a lot depending on what else is going on. There are times when I write for an hour every morning, and there are times when I have to wait until I can set aside a week or a weekend and write intensely then. But I always keep working on text throughout a production, it never stops changing until the play closes. That's a nice thing about production as opposed to publication, you can keep noodling endlessly. 4. Which playwright or play do you feel is underrated by popular culture? At this point in our history and in this country I don't think any really good theater can register at all in popular culture. Except maybe through patterns of affiliation that exist because of people who write plays and also write for TV, i.e. indirectly. 5. If you could have any actor or actress work on a play with you, who would it be and why? Well I love the actors I do work with! So I would always pick them. But like stars? Hmm. Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert come to mind, because I think they're both so smart and such brave performers. And funny. I like Kumail Nanjiani too. A sense of humor is key, and someone who also writes or at least thinks in a rigorous way about the world, that's the kind of actor I really like to work with. 6. Can you tell us about a time when your experiences as a playwright directly informed your life as a professor? When I teach my playwriting class, I'm often thinking about experiences I've had as an artist, and also helpful things other artists have said to me. But I think more generally, my sense of what it means to be an artist is bound up with a sense of advocating for a principle that familiarity and truth are at odds with each other, and likewise when I teach I'm mostly trying to help students engage with things that are weird and difficult. 7. What can dramatic literature add to the arts that no other genre or type of literature can? I'm not sure dramatic literature inherently does anything very different from what other kinds of literature do, except that plays are also thinking about and changing the theater. Pieces of dramatic literature are pieces of theory about what theater is. But if you asked me what theater does that no other art does, I might say it has something to do with letting a kind of violence emerge between language and reality. I do think theater has a specific kind of relationship to the real, even though I'd never say it simply is "more real" or more immediate or anything like that. 8. When did you become interested in becoming a playwright? I was around theater as a kid because I grew up in New York and my mother worked in one; she also started taking me to see experimental theater shows when I was pretty young-- junior high? I was always a writer because of teachers I had as a kid and general bookwormery. So I think it was a matter of time. Like lots of kids I used to want to be a performer, because I craved attention. But ultimately it's too boring to be told what to do and besides I wasn't good enough at it; I'd rather tell other people what to do. (I mean, make gentle requests.) 9. What advice would you give someone interesting in going into dramatic literature? Do you mean someone who wanted to write plays? I would say, immediately start putting them on, on a very small scale. If you write them and they languish on your computer you're just encouraging a sense of crippling isolation and resentment. And I think if you write plays it's your responsibility to make them exist in performance too. I would also say go and see lots of things and ask people whose plays you like what they think you should read and see. I would say a lot of other things too and I do when I teach, but those are probably the biggest ones. Parks, in an essay in her first collection of plays, says, "Right from the jump, ask yourself, 'Why does this thing I'm writing have to be a play?'" I think that's good advice. And I also think you probably can't do that without having a lived experience of different things that plays can be.

[bodyliterature-blog]

JULIA JARCHO

Dominic hated flattery worse than low-sodium soup, but he could tell Moran was being sincere. “All right,” he said. “Have the buys messenger me the crime scene photos ASAP. And tell the asshole I’ll take the case.” It was to be the most fateful decision of his life.

CONTINUE READING

[upnextbayarea-blog]

Quote via I Interview Playwrights.