Julia May Jonas profile by Jesse Cameron Alick
Bushwick is sunny and spray painted, and there's a group of tourists on a walking tour standing in front of a massive Kardashian poster. I run into no less than 4 popular DJs while sipping my tea with Julia May Jonas as we sit outside The Wycoff Starr coffee shop, a standing relic from Julia’s early days in the neighborhood. “There were just two spots we used to go to back then. This and Northeast Kingdom - such a special restaurant; my husband and I had our first anniversary dinner there just because we loved it so much.”
Julia started working at The Bushwick Starr in 2004, doing art with an “experimental spirit” before she married those impulses more closely with traditional playwriting. “I have many kinds of things that I do as a theater artist; music, poetic text that feels both real and unreal at the same time, and I really like to exist in a kind of unreality that can appear very close to reality.” A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN, Julia’s new show premiering at The Bushwick Starr in October, carries forward those practices. “I started rewriting these classic ‘white male experience’ plays that I thought were specifically very American and canonical and dealt with issues of masculinity; Long Day's Journey into Night, True West, American Buffalo, Zoo Story - and now All My Sons.” Rather than doing plays that gender swap and tell men’s stories using female bodies, Julia rewrites plays to be from a truly female point of view.
“I've been specifically thinking about catharsis and have gotten really back into The Poetics. Aristotle says, an ideal protagonist should probably be a man, best if he's a king, not so good if there is a woman, definitely not a slave. But the idea is like you need someone to have choice and power. So we can watch them bring about their own destruction by their own means. And so A WOMAN AMONG WOMEN is very much thinking about that.”
Julia moved to NYC the very same year as I did, back in 1999, and she and I talk about destruction, rebirth, neighborhoods changing, friends losing their apartments, theaters lost, new theaters being built. Julia’s show will be the first one in the new Bushwick Starr space and this has such meaning to her. It’s a hopeful thing to get to work at a local theater which hasn’t followed the tide of commercial viability, but simply supports artists to their fullest extent.
“The majority of places that I've made meaning have been places where I've created theater - especially the Starr, because they've really been my artistic home for 20 years; the place that I keep returning to, that was always offering me opportunities. Do you want to be part of this program? Do you want to do a show? We have a slot for you. We have this. And they have evolved. As much as I've evolved as an artist, they've evolved as an institution.”
During the Pandemic, Julia published a novel and is now hard at work on her second book. And so everything changes, everything grows. Things are torn down, and things are built up. And we grow together.
by Jesse Cameron Alick
artwork by Brenna O’Brien