News
“Fridge” selected for Short+Sweet Perth 2021
Jennifer’s play Fridge has been selected (out of more than 620 international submissions) for production in Short+Sweet Perth 2021 in Western Australia. Fridge will be performed on March 21 and 21, 2021.
“Fridge” and “Most Wonderful” selected for Best Ten-Minute Play anthologies
Jennifer’s Fridge will be published in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2021, edited by Debbie Lamedan and forthcoming in August from Smith and Kraus. Jennifer’s Most Wonderful will be published in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2021, edited by Lawrence Harbison and due out in November from Applause Theater & Cinema Books.
The Covid Monologues
Jennifer’s monologue In Memory of Maria Mercader honoring journalist and CBS news producer Maria Mercader is currently streaming as part of Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble‘s The Covid Monologues celebrating and memorializing lives lost to Covid.
Excerpts
The thing about juggling—what no one really knows—is that it has no clear definition. Not unlike some people. What is it, really? Is it art or entertainment? Reality or illusion? One thing is certain: you must never take your eyes off the balls, not for a moment. For if you do—if you look away, say, at something that’s coming at you…then everything falls.
In twin chairs by the lakeside tonight
we’ve watched day’s last lightspread like a bright blush over treetops
past the point where cabins standabandoned, sealed against winter.
In the middle distance the island floats,fading. There alone the wild blueberries
hang like unmarked globes over waterseparating shore from shore.
Why they grow there but not herepuzzles, like love or the coming bereavements
of autumn, or rumors of empty, drifting skiffs.For now at least the island remains
part and not part of the unknowing nightas we are to each other
island and mainland, ship and shore,a familiar place; a mystery.
I never understood the expression “heavenly bodies.” Because a) they’re not bodies, and b) they’re not in Heaven. Heaven’s a place we can’t see until we get there. If we get there. If it even exits.
She is making herself and not herself—
anguish dressed in baroque repose,a motionlessness that is never still,
arranged, betraying nothing—the restrained line of an eyebrow or lip,
the arc of a neck, the skillful reflectionof a sleeve of the moon-white gown
in the olive-green watergradually assembled, balanced there
in this unexpected moment,this small world holding its breath.
When I was a kid I had a pitchback. I’d throw the ball to it, and if the pitch was right, it would come right back to me and land in my glove. If the pitch was wrong, the ball would end up on the lawn, rolling away. Other people are like that, I think: They’re like a pitchback. You throw your stuff at them, and if it’s right or good enough, it’ll come back to you in some way, and you’ll be changed. Of course, sometimes someone steals your pitchback, or it breaks, and you don’t know where to pitch the ball. There’s just a mass of open air before you. So you go out, and get a new one. It isn’t the same as the first one— they never are—but it’ll have its own beauty, its own tensions, its own lovely form. And when you pitch to it, if you do it carefully, it’ll respond, and pitch yourself back to you, and you’ll know who you are. Again. If you ever knew.