In the past year, Jen Silverman has seen her plays performed at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia and for a workshop production at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School in New York City. She’s an “affiliated artist” at five different theater companies. She’s received grants or fellowships to create new work through some of the most prestigious theater organizations in the country, including Connecticut’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center and the Yale Institute for Music Theatre.
The Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven is producing the world premiere of Silverman’s dark comedy “The Moors” Jan. 29 through Feb. 20.
“Yeah,” the playwright says, smiling. “I have a lot of things in development.”
Everybody wants a piece of Jen Silverman. And everyone, it seems, is getting a distinctly different piece.
“The Roommates,” which premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival a year ago, is a genre-bending “Odd Couple” comedy gone awry about a country woman and a city woman who share a house and end up dealing drugs. “All the Roads Home,” which had readings at the O’Neill Center in Waterford in the summer of 2013, is set in three separate time periods, chronicling the dreams of a daughter, her mother and grandmother. “Phoebe in Winter,” which ran at New York’s Wild Project, also in the summer of ’13, is about war, class and identity. Silverman graduated from Brown University in 2006, received a master’s in fine arts from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop in 2011 and also studied at the Playwrights Program at Juilliard. She has been getting her plays produced regularly since 2011, with her breakthrough, in terms of critical attention, being “Phoebe in Winter.”
“It’s really important for me to do something as opposite as possible from the last thing,” Silverman says.
“The Moors” isn’t just different from Silverman’s other plays, it’s different from anyone else’s plays. Inspired by the lives and works of the 19th-century novel-writing sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brönte, “The Moors” mixes quasi-biographical information and literary references. It has a period feel and a Gothic sensibility, but is very much a modern, contemporary play. Oh, and some of the actors are playing animals, namely a mastiff and a moorhen.
“It’s neither an adaptation nor a parody,” Silverman explains. “It’s about how we are shaped by landscapes around us — our longing to be seen, our longing to be loved.” That landscape-shaping can be literal. According to the show’s director, Jackson Gay, “The moor is so much of a character in the play. We’re trying to create that, with dry ice for fog and other effects. A real Gothicky feel. The costumes are appropriate to the period, so you think you know what sort of play this will be. Then, after a while, you say, ‘Oh! I don’t recognize this at all!’ It’s as if the Brönte Sisters dropped down into a comedic production of a Beckett play.”
Silverman laughs at Gay’s description. “Yes. Although I think plot concerns me more than it did Beckett.”
“The Moors” is full of mysteries that should not be revealed in a synopsis. “These two spinster sisters live on the moors,” Silverman begins. “A governess shows up in the first scene … but we have not met a child.”
Silverman came to her fondness for the Bröntes honestly. She was a Comparative Literature major at Brown. “I’ve read all their famous books, and some of the minor ones. I loved the letters, about the outside world: ‘Emily has a cough.’ The moors even come up in the correspondence.”
“But,” Gay says, “this really is an actors’ play.” Silverman agrees: “I wouldn’t say it banks on spectacle.”
It was Silverman who approached Gay about directing “The Moors.” The director’s work had been praised by two “very different” playwrights she knew, Silverman says. “I thought, she’s clearly a playwright’s director.”
“I love doing the first thing with Jen,” Gay says about getting to direct “The Moors'” world premiere. Gay, whose Yale Rep stagings of “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow” and “These Paper Bullets!” both moved on to New York, hopes that “The Moors” might have “a future life” as well. Gay’s known for her work on new plays, but she talks of “having recent experience of doing things more than one time. I like seeing something as it grows and changes.”
As for Silverman, who seems to have her pick of regional and New York theaters at which she could develop her plays, she’s thrilled to have a world premiere at the Yale Rep. When asked, given her eclecticism, what sort of theater she might run if someone made her an artistic director, Silverman muses: “If I had a theater, I’d focus on new plays. I’d do works by women playwrights, playwrights of color, queer playwrights. … New plays, where form and content are deeply entwined.
“That’s why I’ve been in love with the Yale Rep forever, because this is what they do.”
“THE MOORS” will be performed Jan. 29 through Feb. 20 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., plus an 8 p.m. Monday performance on Feb. 1 and 2 p.m. matinees on Feb. 6, 10, 13 and 20. Information: 203-432-1234, yalerep.org.
Editor’s Note: This updated version clarifies a reference to Silverman’s production at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School in New York City.
