God's Ear

The Shadow of a Future Self
by Nina Steiger




Jenny Schwartz uses language like a composer might, embellishing a simple melody with harmonics. Harmonic pitches, made up of partial or component frequencies, are what give different instruments their distinct timbres and give us the ability to determine that two instruments playing in unison are in fact distinct from each other. The range of sounds an instrument is capable of is amplified and what we can hear is extended by these "partials." As a composer might use these tones to complexify a melody, likewise, Jenny's characters, scenes, and moments--fragments and partials themselves--are able to convey an expansive and nuanced emotional landscape using deceptively simple elements.
When I first talked to Jenny about her process, she indicated that it could be a time-consuming one, working toward "getting it right." But it wasn't until we worked together on a script-in-progress for Soho Theatre that I truly appreciated the precision with which she forges the kind of moments that distinguish her work. She massages the rhythms and beats of each scene with an alertness to the intentions underneath each line. She has astonishing instincts for capturing the hidden languages we speak when we talk casually to the people we treasure most and intimately with those we don't know at all.
Jenny's scenes are characterized by people in apparent isolation. They seem to find it easy to talk, but hard to say what they mean; simple to express something, but never in their own words. This creates a particular and often peculiar rhythm and vernacular. Her characters seem to invite us into the recesses of their marriages, their memories, and their dramas with the most familiar of phrases. Yet these phrases are applied in new ways, overturned and contraverted to let us know that there is more to what's said than what we hear. "I have deficiencies," Mel tells Ted. Repetitions are woven into the dialogue. At the heart of this is the accrued meaning a phrase or confrontation gains in repeated approaches, each time affording the characters a higher sense of emotional acuity and the audience a deeper sense of identification.
Like an antenna capturing multiple frequencies, Jenny pinpoints lives comprised of fragments--echoes of memory and dreams, conversations we're too busy to finish, snippets we hear from other peoples' cell-phone calls, moments we observe in waiting rooms, lounges, and lobbies. The comparison to harmonics lies in Jenny's masterful use of partial thoughts and moments that combine to give her work its distinct flavor. Her writing captures something of the pain and humor within a particular dissociation so many of us feel today.
These characters have borrowed words from the surrounding atmosphere and have anguish they cannot express. One of the most stirring moments must surely be a long speech of Mel's which becomes an aria of clichés. It begins as a call to arms, a manifesto of newly made meanings and, by extension, possibilities. This speech ends with a reiteration of the marriage vows that are straining in the wake of a loss. We end with a maudlin couplet: "And the fat lady will sing. / With bells on."
The play presents a mosaic; each of its tiles offer grace notes of misunderstanding, odd applications of everyday idioms, overturned clichés, and phantom lines from one character in the mouth of another. What emerges from the fragments is a compelling portrait of grief and recalibration. It's a perfect snapshot of a family in transition and it articulates aspects of the human heart and the modern condition. "We am. / I. / Were. / We was."


Nina Steiger is the director of the Writers' Centre at Soho Theatre, London.
Copyright © 2008 by Jenny Schwartz