Jonah, 26 January 2024

Jonah was a beautifully crafted play with just the right amount of ambiguity to keep the audience intrigued about what we were seeing but also enjoying puzzling out the possible relationships between the scenes. What I appreciated above all was that playwright Rachel Bonds wrapped everything up so that the audience left with clarity on which events actually happened but also a desire to reflect on the scenes in their newly clarified context. As I was leaving the theatre, I found myself rerunning the show in my head, turning it over on repeat, reflecting on the profound sadness of the disparity between the simplicity of what the protagonist, Ana, wanted and the reality of her life.

The show was not named after Ana, but Jonah, her constructed fantasy of what it would have been like to lose her virginity and discover her sexual agency on her own terms. The play opened on Ana and Jonah getting to know each other. Jonah was not the traditional definition of sexy. He was nerdy and awkward. Sweet, shy, and innocent. He asks for consent. He wants to live out her naive, bashful, romantic fantasies even though they are more about being loved than enjoying physical intimacy, and his fantasies are simple and noninvasive– he’s happy just to touch her rear end.

This lovely, charming opening scene was a stark contrast to the disturbing violence of Ana’s real life. When Ana was 11, her mother married a violent, abusive man who already had two sons of his own, one of whom, Danny, sexually abused Ana and exploited her kindness as if it was a weakness. Ana felt helpless and powerless to leave, but also emotionally connected to Danny as the person who saved her from potentially worse abuse from his father.

The way this was portrayed on stage was nonlinear. The ambiguous set supported the dissociation that Ana described toward the end of the show. Feeling disembodied. Having moments play out in her head with some ambiguity and confusion on the details. Things she wanted to remember or forget, but couldn’t quite. The way that moments blur together and fantasy and flashbacks intertwine.

Danny’s suicide was graphically depicted, with him slitting his wrists/arm on stage. Yet when asked how he died years later at a writer’s retreat, Ana said he shot himself in the head. I wondered about this moment. Did she remember this moment more violently than it actually occurred because of the pain it caused her? Or was she lying about it years later in an attempt to suppress her pain or minimize the damage to the person she was telling the story to? I enjoyed this kind of discrepancy because trauma survivors do often struggle with the choice between traumatizing others and retraumatizing themselves. The struggle is, in a word: unwinnable.

The minimalist costumes contributed to this feeling of struggle. As Ana aged, parts of her were frozen in time, unchanging.  Halfway through, she added an additional layer– partially see through, an attempt to cover up her past and hide her shame. In a lot of ways, she was an adult swathed in her childhood, unable to advance her life because of how young she was when her life got derailed. In some ways, she grew up too fast. In others, she did not grow up at all.

The show concluded with a scene that began with Ana at a writer’s retreat, years after Danny’s death. She bonds with another writer at the retreat, a former Mormon named Steven. Steven is interested in her, but awkward, like Jonah. Unlike in the opening scene, where Ana’s innocence was matched by Jonah’s awkwardness, the show closed with powerful final thoughts about sexual shame and navigating the world when you have been circumstantially conditioned out of your autonomy. Ana breaks down because she feels ashamed of wanting love in a world of sex; Steven breaks down because he feels ashamed of wanting sex in a world of love. And somehow, we find ourselves back where we started– two people who fantasize about exploring life’s questions.

In this final moment, they are able to take on and yet remove each other’s shame. It’s not true love or a romantic happily ever after. It’s a moment. It’s a way station. A freeze frame of healing for two people whose difficult journeys led them to write and to bare their souls on paper without being able to do so in their bodies. This moment is ephemeral, as fleeting as the fantasy of Jonah from the opening scene. Just a reminder that even in a hard, cruel world there are still kind, inviting people.

And yet the play is named Jonah, which highlights the importance of (and lack of shame in) the little fantasies that get people through the day. That it’s okay to have wants and desires and to think about them and to want to share them with someone, especially when your body feels far away and worn down from abuse.

I also can’t help but speculate about the biblical origins of Jonah’s name. Jonah lived in the belly of a whale, in isolation, providing his own warmth and trying to make peace with G-d. In a sense, this parallels Ana’s journey. She finds herself in a difficult situation in which she feels utterly alone and cast aside. Rather than leave her “belly of the whale”, she learns to live there. She accepts living there as her lot.

An important diversion from the biblical story of Jonah—Ana did not bring this fate upon herself. At the conclusion of the play, she is back on a path of seeking truth, and, importantly, writing truth that conveys a message that people need to hear, whether or not she is fully ready to deliver it. In this final moment with Steven, she experiences some of the release and acceptance that hopefully, as in the biblical story of Jonah, will guide her to a path of comfort.

Though the story has parallel moments, it also deviates in another way that is worth pondering. The story of Jonah is often brought up in the context of repentance. Rachel Bonds’ Jonah explores situations of victimization in which people suffer for others’ sinful behavior and bear the consequences of others’ violence. The conclusion, as I interpreted it, is that people can be in need of healing without needing to repent for being victims of abuse, for circumstances beyond their control, for childhood fantasies that may not ever have truly been wrong. That just because your story is close to a familiar one does not mean you should assume the role of the analogous character—it is okay to experience confusion surrounding pain, abuse, and forgiveness. That does not mean you have done something wrong.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.