A Profound Kind of Intimacy: A Conversation with Playwright Rachel Bonds

Rachel Bonds winning the Concord Theatricals Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival with her play Anniversary feels like the beginning of an ongoing relationship not only with our catalogue, but on themes of growth, moving on, and a universality of space. It’s present in that short play as well as many of her other works, which are viscerally apparent to all those who read/see them.

I reached out to Rachel to chat with her about her plays.

How would you describe your work/writing overall?

I’m interested in exploring and exploding intimacy, emotional and sexual, people carrying wells of grief and trying to live anyway, parents and children, siblings, stories walking along the line between immense tragedy and hilarity, people struggling with their mental health, people who feel deeply, people who might understand the hot needles of anxiety or the cold waters of depression. Women trying to make sense of themselves and their bodies once they’ve grown and birthed and cared for children. Motherhood and womanhood. I’m interested in people who are full of longing. Then I also want every play to be really, really funny. Even when it’s about the dark, murky stuff of life. Especially when it’s about that stuff. I want the characters to make the audience laugh and to make each other laugh. Jonah can only come into its full power if we experience both the pain that Ana endures AND the cinnamon rolls that a horribly bug-bitten former Mormon delivers to her door.

In Anniversary (US/UK), you share this beautiful image of a map, specifically one state, expanding and contracting as a metaphor for sadness and grief. I’d love to know how that image came to you.

Penelope, the protagonist of that play, says inside her is a map. And there’s one place she’s put this thing that’s happened to her. Let’s call it Iowa. And there are some days when she can just see Iowa over there, she knows it’s there, it’s part of her, but she can keep standing and living and going about her day in New York. But then there are days when Iowa is all she sees, everything in Iowa expands and overflows and washes her away. And she can’t be anywhere but in Iowa; it’s flooded her entire internal country. When I was writing that play I was thinking about how learning to incorporate grief into your life is knowing it will always sit in you somewhere. Living with it means knowing some days it feels more sharp and alive and in the foreground, but as time marches itself forward, it can move to the background. It’s there, you know it’s there, but maybe it’s blurry. It’s not ruling your day. I was trying to get at that experience and the map unfolded itself in front of me.

In Five Mile Lake (US/UK), there is an overarching theme of small town vs. big city as a way of discussing not only physical separation but distance as resentment because of life choices/circumstances. What is your relationship to both small towns and big cities? How does that inform your work?

I’m from a tiny mountain town in middle Tennessee. Now I live in New York. I love living in New York. It feels, at this moment, the only place I want to live. I love how completely and utterly alive it is, both disgusting and sublime. I love knowing there’s always someone awake no matter what time it is. But I am from a place full of trees and open space, awe-inspiring sunsets over the valley below. I grew up in the dirt and the grass and the leaves, playing in the backyard until it got dark. That shaped me. That shaped all the stories inside me. I love New York and I love raising children here, and I miss those trees. I miss the people who knew me as a kid. I miss the people who knew my dad. There is and always will be a push-pull in me, there will always be a conflict between home then and home now. I find that conflict inherently dramatic and so it has become a thread that runs through my work.

Some of those same themes are present in Sundown, Yellow Moon (US/UK), but that was a show you worked on with the musical group The Bengsons. How does music factor into this play and your work in general?

Sundown was the first time I experimented with music. That play was directly inspired by the last summer I spent with my dad before he died. He and a group of his friends would gather on Saturday nights to play music in the living room. The setting of Sundown is a character as much as Tom or Ray or Joey; it is the cricket-screaming summer nights in Tennessee, where music is just part of the fabric of everyone’s lives. Because I was writing about that time and that place, it only felt right that music live and breathe throughout the piece.

More recently I’ve been working on The Lonely Few, an original rock musical that Zoe Sarnak and I wrote together. That piece is a full-on musical, though like Sundown, much of the music is diegetic. Finally, I’d say that writing for me feels like scoring music – it is really important to me to capture a specific rhythm of speech. The dialogue is written with very particular punctuation so that the music of the language can be unlocked by the actors. It is rigorous and athletic, and constructed very carefully so that the emotional events can really sing.

Swimmers (US/UK), on the other hand, is much more of a representation of a smaller physical space, an office building, but within that building there is this multi-faceted ecosystem of varied relationships and people that feels so expansive. Could you talk more about what drew you to write about an office environment?

Originally I was drawn to that environment because it felt inherently funny to me. There’s such a mix of public and private at work. And so many behaviors that YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO because you’re at work. It is supposed to be a place of control and order. And then to put people who are spinning out of control in all of their messy human ways inside that environment just made me laugh. So I started with Tom, who was returning to work after having a rather dramatic panic attack the week before, and built the play from there, thinking about how offices, which can often feel so cold and austere, can hold people with vast and chaotic worlds inside them. And then the space offered the potential for a different but still profound kind of intimacy – the kind you might share with a stranger.

When I saw your most recent play, Jonah (US/UK), all I could think about was how rarely I see stories that so unabashedly discuss the development of people’s relationship to intimacy. What was the impetus for this play?

I wrote most of the first draft of Jonah in a fever of five days I stole away from home, away from my toddler and domestic responsibilities, closed in a sunlit bedroom in Upstate New York, alone for the first time in many, many months.

The seed of the play was planted during the 2016 election, when I was nervously navigating pregnancy for the first time, and the Washington Post released that video of “locker room talk.” It made me think about how much locker room talk I’d swallowed and accepted. How my body had lit up in flames inside, but my mind so quickly brushed it aside. I started to think about how often my body and my mind were separated by these little comments – my mind flying, fleeing somewhere else to protect me. I thought about the stories I would tell myself to keep going, keep walking, to not just explode into a pile of burning ashes on a sidewalk.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, the seed of the play sprouted into a thick, green shoot. I watched as Dr. Ford recounted what had happened to her all those years ago, and I thought about my own sexual history. I realized many of my first sexual experiences were more upsetting than I had allowed myself to understand. I had shaped them and reshaped them to make them seem fine, funny, normal, and if they weren’t, I explained them away by blaming myself. After being hurt by so many men, and not even close to the kind of pain some women have experienced, I asked myself, how have I come to trust anyone? How has intimacy saved me? How could a woman who has been through trauma far worse than mine feel alive in her body again? Ana’s story was born from these questions.

What do you hope to see of your plays in future productions?

I hope they can hold and support actors in all kinds of bodies and mean something to a wide range of audiences. I guess I write them because I want to feel more alive and I hope that anyone working on my plays or watching my plays will feel less alone and perhaps be driven to have a thought or a conversation they would never had otherwise been able to have.

What is the one thing you hope audiences/theatres take away from seeing or producing one of your plays?

I hope they feel more connected to themselves and the people around them.

To learn more about plays by Rachel Bonds and other great playwrights, visit Concord Theatricals in the US or UK.