When Julia Jarcho was a young girl in New York City, her mother had a job at a foundation that required her to go see a wide variety of theater productions, including experimental theater. She often brought Julia along.
"I got exposed to kinds of theater that most people never see, and certainly not when they're that young," Jarcho said.
By the time she was in high school, Jarcho was involved in the world of theater herself, "meeting young adult artists who were making experimental plays on shoestring budgets. People were writing plays and directing them and producing them, which gave me a sense of playwriting as part of a process of theater making."
She found her passion when she began playwriting herself - a play she wrote as a high school senior was a winner of the Young Playwrights Festival National Playwriting Competition. (The one-act play, "Nursery," was about alienated high school kids and fantasies of violence.)
Now a professor of theater, dance and performance studies in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Jarcho has since firmly established her reputation as a playwright and director of experimental theater. Many of her plays have been produced by her New York City-based Minor Theater.
Her play "Grimly Handsome," produced as part of Incubator Arts Project's Other Forces festival, won a 2013 Obie Award for Best New American Play. She has also won a Doris Duke Impact Award and a Mark O'Donnell Award; she has been a MacDowell Fellow and an LCT New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center.
Prior to coming to Yale, she directed the M.F.A. program in playwriting at Brown University. She is the author of three scholarly books, the most recent of which is "Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism" (University of Chicago, 2024).
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Jarcho sat down with Yale News to talk about her current fascination with the concept of glamour, her next theater production, and her favorite hobby. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley once called you "a queen of experimental mayhem." Do you think that is an apt description of your work?
Julia Jarcho: First of all, I was obviously delighted when he wrote that. But you know, I don't think my work is particularly chaotic. I actually think of myself as generally pursuing some form of order. The only way to do that is to experiment. I do really identify with the experimental part. The pieces of theater that I make, depending on the context, might feel like mayhem sometimes. At the heart, the point is to tell the truth about the mayhem that it is to be alive.
Will you still be writing and producing plays for Minor Theater while you're at Yale?
Jarcho: Yes, my theater work has always had to live next to my academic work. So, it's always happened at a pretty gradual pace. I'm not putting on a new show every year. But we have a play that's happening this January, "Pity Whore," that we're already working on the production for. That will be the first time since "Marie It's Time" in 2022 that I've had a production, so I'm excited about it.
You're teaching a course this semester simply called "Glamour." What's that about?
Jarcho: A couple of things made me want to think about glamour critically, intellectually, and theoretically. One was that when I was running the playwriting program at Brown, I would choose a theme every semester to work with the playwrights on. One semester I chose glamour, and it was an incredibly fun thing to talk about and think about and try to define and redefine. There's something about that as a topic that feels like a little bit of an antidote to some of the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing and self-seriousness that we in the academy and in the humanities are often prey to, though often with good reason. But amidst the darkness of the last several years, having a topic that is kind of unashamedly frivolous and sort of anti-moral feels pretty good. It's been really fun to hear what the students here think and to watch them make different kinds of sense with the texts. That's been a big highlight for me so far.
The other part is, one of the writers that I wrote about in my last book on masochism was the playwright Adrienne Kennedy. So many people have written and thought about her amazing body of work, but one thing that hasn't been totally addressed and that I certainly don't feel like I managed to address is a certain obsession with glamour that runs through it. I wanted the chance to think more about that. It's now my latest book project.
What do you like to do when you're not working on theater?
Jarcho: I'm a parent, so I spend a lot of time with my 10-year-old, who is awesome. I also really like baking. I've come to realize it's my favorite hobby. It's tactile and sensory, the things that a lot of this work is not. There's another universe close to this one in which I am a baker.
