Whether or not you were particularly into that English class you had to take on that old British guy and his plays, you probably remember the girl who always sat in the front and said words like “enjambment” and “assonance.” Tess Jonas ’15 was probably that girl. The Argus sat down with the budding playwright to talk about an upcoming staged reading of “War for February,” her new full-length play being workshopped this week. Aspiring dramaturges can swing by the Fayerweather Theater Studio this Friday or Saturday at 8 p.m. to hear a reading of Jonas’ work-in-progress performed under nauseatingly fluorescent lighting.
The Argus: So you’ve spent this week workshopping your play, “War for February.” What does that entail?
Tess Jonas: I’ve been working on this play since last fall. I really loved the idea of the play. I revisited it last spring and was like, “Wow, I think there’s a lot of more work that can be done, and I think this is exactly how writing this play is supposed to go.” And Sivan [Battat ’15] agreed to direct it, because Sivan spent the summer basically interning at a professional company that does this same process. But we could do it for a week, have actors; we could be revising things. So yeah, essentially that.
A: Can you talk a little about the writing process?
TJ: I write a lot of poetry. A lot of it came from poems that I’d written. A lot of it came from very separate exercises that I did in class and out of class, and they kind of all just found music together, essentially.
A: Was “War for February” inspired by anything specific?
TJ: I really like Shakespeare, took Shakespeare freshman fall.
A: Where did the title come from?
TJ: A poem that I wrote that makes its way into the play. It kind of defines one of the characters.
A: Were you influenced by any playwrights at the time of writing it?
TJ: Shakespeare. And now Sarah Ruhl.
A: Do you have a favorite play?
T: “Macbeth.”
A: So is this the first play you’ve written?
TJ: It’s the first play I’ve—yeah. No, this draft of it isn’t the first play I’ve written but in the initial draft, this was the first play.
A: Another of your plays, “Food Play,” was accepted to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival that happened a few weeks ago.
TJ: Yeah, a professional director and a bunch of, like, students, in theater programs both BA and BFA worked on it.
A: How was that?
TJ: It was an amazing experience, very different from the experience I’m having here. I worked with a professional director there—not that Sivan’s not an incredible director, but I think this was a learning experience for her as well, whereas my “Food Play” director Kaya has done this millions and millions of times. She’s a professor. This process here is more about rewriting, whereas there it wasn’t so much about rewriting so much as it was about—well, that play was at a place where it was about sharing the text with actors and a director. This process is kind of a few steps before that process in that it’s, like, getting to the point where that sharing can happen, ’cause the play hasn’t been through that yet.
A: You’re an English and dance double major, right?
TJ: Yes.
A: Why no theater?
TJ: In all seriousness, [I don’t] think the way the major functions… plays to my strengths and what I want to get out of it. As much as I respect the need to understand technical theater, I don’t need to prove that I can hang a light by doing 60 hours of…I don’t feel the need to do that. Of course this is all coming with a grain of salt that, you know, there is a way that I might end up just completing the theater major anyway, but I’m not. It’s also, like, I can get in to all the classes I want and get the theater experience from other places, ’cause majoring in theater isn’t the only way to study theater.
A: Any plans for a thesis?
TJ: Yeah. My hope is to figure out what I want to research, do one bout of research, and present that research in two ways, so do a dance version of that research and a play version of that research so it’s the dance version of the play and the play version of the dance. So basically, it’s like two art forms presenting the same research, and I’m kind of experimenting with that this semester, because for my spring dance I’m using a play that I wrote last semester and using that as the source text for the dance and taking sounds from the play and text from the play and themes from the play and images from the play to inspire movement. And if that fails, and I hate it, I’m gonna change my thesis. But if it works, that could be great.
A: Yeah, I’ve heard that the Dance department focuses on the cultivating the art form rather than technical proficiency. Has that been true in your case?
TJ: I think that’s true, but more than that, I think it’s about choreography and finding your voice as a choreographer as opposed to perfecting your fuckin’ plié.
A: You’ve been involved in a lot of musical theater and classical choirs on campus. Ever considered writing a musical?
TJ: No. I don’t write music. That’s a skill that I have a ton of respect for and I do not have. I thought about trying to write lyrics but, I don’t know…maybe someday! It’s also when I write, I’m not writing for myself to perform in the things that I write. I think my performer hat and my writer hat are very very different, and I don’t wear them at the same time. ’Cause then I’d be wearing two hats, and I’d look like a fuckin’ idiot.
A: What are your post-workshop plans for “War for February?”
TJ: Maybe submitting it. I made a ton of amazing contacts at the Kennedy Center, like different directors who were interested in reading more of my scripts and different designers who were interested in reading those scripts so they could design them. So once this is in a place where I’m comfortable sharing the text, I think yeah, sharing the text would be a possibility.
A: Do you have any other projects in the works?
TJ: I’ve been writing. I’m in [a playwriting course] again this semester, so I’m starting to formulate what I want to write. Part of me wants to just write a bunch of 10-minute plays because I don’t have a lot of those in my repertoire. At this point, I have one full-act and two one-acts, and then another one-act that sucks, but we’re not gonna talk about that. For young writers submitting, there’s a ton of 10-minute play festivals and, like, 10-minute plays are more likely to get accepted in more places. It’s just economical for a theater; like, financially, it makes sense to put on a 10-minute play festival. And I got to meet and do some workshops with Gary Garrison who basically started, basically coined the 10-minute play as we see it now—when I was at the writing center thing—and he used to be the head of playwriting at Tisch, and he said “You should have 10-minute plays if you want to be a writer.” He’s made his entire career out of 10-minute plays. But I’m also reconsidering a one-act or doing a full-length.
I’m also into the idea of like—my younger brothers are very important to me, and they were both adopted—and so writing a play about the kind of ethics and family dynamics that come from being part of an adopted family and, with that, the ethics and family dynamics that are instilled in children who have been in orphanages. So I’m doing a lot of research on J.M. Barry and Peter Pan. I also had an amazing experience being a camp counselor for three year olds and I really became friends with these three-year-old boys who would just play pirates with me and make me act like a kid. Especially this week, I’ve been working on a play that’s about women, very young women and their ideas about family.
A: Do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights?
TJ: [Laughs.] LOL.
A: “Write plays.”
TJ: I mean…try. Because I didn’t write plays till I got to Wesleyan. I was kind of like, “Oh! I’ll take Intro to Playwriting! I might hate it!” And then I was like, “Oh wait, like I’m actually…I kinda dig this.” Don’t censor what you write, and don’t set up expectations for yourself. Don’t get caught up in being, like, “This is the play I want to write. Like, I want to write the next ‘Streetcar.’” You’re not gonna write the next “Streetcar!” You’re gonna write something different; you might write something more lyrical, you might write something more experimental. You might write something that doesn’t have a lot of words in it. I wrote a play where my four main characters were a television, a radio, an answering machine, and a voicemail. I didn’t think that was the kind of thing that I was into. I think you just can’t judge. You just have to word vomit and edit once you have materials to edit.