Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman

Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and essayist Jen Silverman (they/them) won the Jane Chambers Prize for Excellence in Feminist Playwriting in 2012. Since then, Silverman has added nearly a dozen full length plays, several novels, and multiple screenwriting credits to their body of work. Before the pandemic, Silverman was pegged as a “downtown playwright” for works such as Phoebe in Winter, Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, and The Moors, among others. Most recently, Silverman’s play The Roommate ran on Broadway featuring Patti Lupone and Mia Farrow in 2024, and their adaptation of Strindberg’s Creditors ran at the Minetta Lane Theatre this past summer. Silverman’s work has been produced widely across the United States (Steppenwolf, The Goodman, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Huntington, Writers Theatre, among others) and internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Spain, and elsewhere. Their books include: We Play Ourselves, The Island Dwellers, and There’s Going to be Trouble (Random House). Their essays have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Vogue. Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim. More information can be found at: https://www.jensilverman.com/

Co-coordinators for ten and twenty years, respectively, of the Jane Chambers Prize, Jen-Scott Mobley (East Carolina University) and Maya E. Roth (Georgetown University) were delighted to connect with Silverman to discuss their trajectory as a writer and collaborator. An avid reader and wicked smart conversationalist, Silverman embraced our invitation to jump into the heart of discussion via two rounds of written questions-and-answers while they worked on a television project in LA.

 This interview was conducted via email in July and September 2025.

It has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

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Maya E. Roth: We first encountered your work when you won the Jane Chambers Prize for Feminist Playwriting in 2012 for your beautiful, early and unexpected play, STILL—which centers a distinctive array of complex relationships, ruptures and reinventions after a forty-year-old woman’s homebirth results in stillbirth. The imagery remains with me still: an irreverent single woman who cradles a pumpkin like her dead infant, her winsome stillborn adult-sized baby who roams for three days in search of his mother, a queer punk teen dominatrix who crushes on the older woman and paints toenails with the unborn son, a masked midwife-turned-dominatrix unleashing her rage at being scapegoated.

When my college students read this play at Georgetown, they are simultaneously shocked, moved, and exhilarated. Likewise so when I taught Witch, your 2022 revisioning of the 17th century The Witch of Edmonton. While their subjects are so different, tonally both plays mix heartbreak, dark humor, disparate cultures, eclectic characters and audacity of storytelling. 

What are the cultural wellsprings that you are drawing from—What inspires any given project for you? Is there something you ask of yourself every time (a representational challenge, for instance) or is it unique from piece to piece?  

Jen Silverman: In my earlier work, I was drawn to wellsprings that were defiantly absurdist, places of juxtaposition and defamiliarization. My characters were struggling with intimacy and violence—systemic as well as interpersonal—but inside containers that refused what I saw as the well-ordered cleanness of realism. STILL is a very early play—so much so that I rarely grant production rights to it anymore—but it definitely exemplifies some of those early touchstones.

In more recent years, my plays have grown out of questions that I can’t shake, that I live alongside until the intensification of the question finds its way into a narrative structure. Then I try to interrogate that structure, without any preconception about what it should be and how it should move. This past year, Sonia Friedman commissioned me to do a new adaptation of August Strindberg’s Creditors. The play takes place between three people, in a sea-side hotel, across one night. It’s Scandinavian realism: emotionally heightened, lyrical, but realism nonetheless. And yet Creditors was the perfect container for the questions I had been living next to, about how we carry with us legacies of damage, when we choose tenderness in the face of violence, whether we can we rewrite our histories . . . and what happens to us when we can’t. I don’t think Strindberg shared my exact theatrical preoccupations—he thought of Creditors as a revenge play, and he had a particular soon-to-be-ex-wife in mind when he wrote it—but the specificity of that form was the perfect vessel for what I wanted to explore, in a way that it might not have been ten years ago.

MER: This was one of the featured first productions of TOGETHER’s collaboration with Audible, right?!

JS: Yes! TOGETHER is a new company formed by Sonia Friedman, Hugh Jackman, and Ian Rickson, and The Creditors was part of their first season at the Minetta Lane, along with Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes.

MER: So those of us who didn’t see it playing in repertory with Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes can listen to Creditors (or teach or research it) via Audible X Together.  How different is the audio version of your play compared to the stage one—or how does it work differently?

JS: It’s the same text, but of course the format relies on sound to give what were previously visual cues: a door opening, an object being set down, and so on. Before the recording session, Ian and Jeremy Blocker and I had a really interesting conversation about one scene in which it might be hard to translate a visual cue into an aural one, and whether we might need to supplement with more text. I gave them a few extra words, but I’m not sure we ended up using them.

MER: What did you think of that producing model? Chamber theatre, spare production values onstage, big names, dual releases on stage and Audible? It’s one of those post-pandemic experiments in staging theatre and trying to make it accessible to a wider range of audiences: Beyond the audio releases, TOGETHER also offered a percentage of free tickets to community groups and steeply discounted ones for same-day purchases, right? Did the audiences indeed diversify? How so, if so, and what changed about the value and/ or reception from stage to audio, and from full-price tickets to disparate community groups?

JS: I really loved being part of that first season. And it did feel a little Wild West-y in a fun way—stripped down, moving fast. Sonia and Ian came to me in December 2024, and we started rehearsals in April 2025. We did get a really diverse audience every night, not just in terms of the most obvious factors like age and race, though there was absolutely that. But it seemed like every audience was comprised of multiple audiences in terms of cultural reference points and their relationship to theatre. It made for an audience reaction that was pretty unpredictable in ways that were largely exciting and occasionally terrifying. Every night during the first week of the show, I would sit in the back row and feel like basically anything could happen, including disaster. And then if, by the end, the entire audience had become one organism, one creature breathing and moving together, it would feel like more of a miracle than ever.

Jen-Scott Mobley: More directly, do you think these two experiments are helping theatre to successfully reach more widely? Any other innovative models you are excited by currently?

JS: I do. And I’m also excited by the site-specific theatrical experiments that are repopulating the landscape more and more. One of my favorites is Nick Westrate and Lucy Owen’s The Streetcar Project. They built a four-actor version without changing the original text, and they’ve been performing it in different venues. The play changes when you see it in a Rachel Comey store vs someone’s backyard vs a church. They’ll be at ACT San Francisco this winter, and it’s exciting to think what a wide and varied life their production has had before it ever landed in a theatre.

JSM: In your essay “My Gender is Masha Green,” you write “I’m hungry to witness queer health & success… & cheeky glamour as well.” Do you identify as a queer writer? How and why does that shape your plays?

JS: Without being too fussy about semantics, I would say I identify as a writer, and also, I’m queer. Meaning, a queer lens is inextricable from the way I reflect the world through my experience, and therefore how I think about story and structure. But I am also white, I am also someone who was raised itinerantly and internationally, I am also a younger sibling, and the child of two scientists, among other things. These are all overlapping, equally inextricable lenses that shape my outlook and therefore my plays. I’m not sure that one is more consciously dominant than another.

That said, in certain contexts, different parts of my identity become important to the person who is responding to the work. I’ve heard from younger people who feel very attached to the ways in which they see queerness in my work, and that response is deeply, personally meaningful to me. When I was younger, I also encountered work in which the kinds of queerness I saw expanded my sense of possibility and let me feel less alone, and so it is incredibly moving to me when other people have that experience with my writing.

JSM: I can attest that your work has been eye-opening and empowering to my students who identify variously as queer or non-binary, female identifying, or feminist. Your work inspires them to read plays! What work(s) expanded your sense of possibility early in your career?

JS: Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill, first. I read their plays in the first few months of freshman year at university—not having grown up going to the theatre, not really having seen any theatre—and I felt like they were talking to me. Paula Vogel and Sarah Ruhl also. Later, in grad school, the playwright Basil Kreimendahl and I went to Chicago to see Sylvan Oswald’s Pony—a genderqueered Woyzeck—and I remember an electric feeling: something was happening on that stage that reminded me that I existed. Or maybe that created a theatrical context in which my existence was part of a shared fabric. 

MER: Whose art inspires you now?

JS: A very short list (too short!) of playwrights & poets & novelists would include David Adjmi, Kaveh Akbar, Traci Brimhall, Alexander Chee, Helen Garner, Sheila Heti, Lucas Hnath, Donika Kelly, Basil Kreimendahl, Young Jean Lee, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mona Pirnot, Max Posner, and Richard Siken. But there are so many others!

JSM: I love to teach The Moors. It never fails to thrill my script analysis students with the strong-willed heroines, the rock ballad, and Mastiff and the Moor Hen. You write a lot of non-human characters (the Mastiff & the Moor Hen, Wink, the PMS-ing Hippos, The Devil) who are at times mysterious, hilarious, charming, and dangerous, but importantly wonderful roles for actors. What does that dramaturgical choice enable you to express?

JS: There’s a permission to speak the truth that comes when you’re putting words in the mouth of a dog or a devil. People have done this long before me—it’s not for nothing that the Devil is the most vivid character in the Gounod opera Faustus. Or that Shakespeare did this with his fools. They’re human, of course, but their distance from status makes them phenomenally observant and ruthlessly insightful. It’s been a while since I’ve worked that way theatrically, but I’m still exhilarated by the kind of brutal truth-telling that can happen by letting the least obvious characters speak from the margins.

JSM: Among the reasons to celebrate your work is that your plays present remarkable opportunities for women and genderqueer actors, for example The 5 Betties, and the “women of a certain age” in The Roommate. How deliberate is that for you when conceiving of a play?

JS: I’ve never really sat down and thought about who should be in a play, without having first thought long and hard about what the play is, what it is attempting to do, what it requires. The Roommate was inspired by a story my mother-in-law told me, and as I chased down what had haunted me inside that story, I found myself writing a play about two women. Collective Rage was born of an overheated pressure-cooker of a summer in which, everywhere I turned, I encountered gendered expectations about what I should be doing with my body, my voice, my mind. In both cases, I was writing about what felt urgent to me, and it found form with those casts and characters.

JSM: We’ve noticed that several of your most recent plays, including Spain, have more men in them. Is that a strategic choice to help get works staged or produced, or is there something else going on here?

JS: Ha! No, not at all. I’m drawn to the play I need to write for a myriad of reasons and then I discover which characters need to populate that story. Sometimes when a play is a commission for a particular theatre, I’ll need to keep in mind certain realities like the actual space, or what cast size is even possible for them, but the gender breakdown of my characters has never been a strategic consideration for me.

MER: I am struck by the disparate sources you adapt theatrically. Obviously Still, which was inspired by—and radically reimagined — the lived experience of one of your professor’s friends at Iowa during graduate school, and Creditors and Witch, which rework classic dramas in inventive new ways, but also your award-winning adaptation for narrative podcast (during the pandemic?) produced and featuring Rachel Brosnahan. I believe the latter springboarded from the Vanity Fair article “Miranda Obsession”—about a woman who uses the persona “Miranda” to seduce an array of powerful men (industry executives) over the phone in the 1980s. What draws you to a text and inspires you to adapt found material from another time, place or form, in unique ways for performance? Commissions? Collaborators? Your own instincts? A writer’s habit?

JS: Sometimes I stumble across a story, and I know right away that it’s saying something to me and that I have something to say back. Generally, that’s the key part—the adaptations around which I’ve had the most immediate certainty are ones where it really feels like I’m being talked to across space and time, and I want to reply. Sometimes a collaborator will bring me something that gives me this immediate spark—most often in the TV or film space—but in theatre and novels, I’m more often just wandering around until I bump into something thrilling. I’m a voracious, nearly pathological reader, though, so there’s also that.

JSM: What makes for a good creative collaboration for you?

JS: I’ve learned that if there’s a real synchrony in what we think is funny, we’re likely to be strongly aligned in other ways too. There’s something about the way humor and playfulness function that shows our relationship to much deeper core values—how we place ourselves in relation to our community, to history, to absurdity. Even relatively granular things like timing and pace matter deeply to a collaboration and are instantly legible in what someone laughs at and why. When I find that kind of alignment with a collaborator, we usually end up building ongoing bodies of work, often across multiple genres.

MER: You have a knack for bending genre, time/space, representation, tone, and in a sense, you are queering form. What does that help you to express or achieve onstage, for storytelling, and/or the world? 

JS: My experience of time and space is a little warped, I think. I grew up switching countries and continents, moving between time-zones and languages. Cultural rules shifted as quickly as I learned them. The world for me is a fundamentally unstable place with all the gifts of that instability—the thrilling potential for transformation—and all of the dangers of sudden slippage. Surprise lives alongside pleasure lives alongside grief.

In addition, I’m a genderqueer person who uses they/them pronouns; my history was shaped by partnerships with people who occupied a series of very different places on the gender spectrum. I believe in the power and pleasure—let’s even say the divine gift—of self-determination. And I guess that can’t help but affect what I make, both its content and its form. My characters are often striving for transformations of all kinds; my theatrical worlds are places where we are taught the rules, and then the rules shift and slip and break open. What we were, what we are, how we are in the process of becoming. Juxtapositions that we might not expect but that speak truth to each other.

MER: The power and pleasure of self-determination. Transformation. Insights that arise from paradox and juxtapositions: This is the kind of storytelling and theatre that I love!

In recent years you seem to have written more explicitly about cultural politics and ethical currents, too—perhaps reluctantly. We are thinking of works like your play Spain, your novel There’s Going to be Trouble, your op-ed in The New York Times, “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable” (April 2024), where you argued that stories should not serve as “instruction manuals” for morals, but rather conduits for artfully exploring complexities and paradoxes. These seem to respond to our changing times.

JSM: What is the role of art relative to society in your mind? Has that role, or your vision of it, changed or heightened, given the U.S today?

JS: I’m drawn to art that contributes to my sense of possibility. Art that opens previously invisible doors inside my head and sends me toward new ways of understanding myself and my context. Maybe not even new, just ways that trigger the exhilaration of newness because they come at me via unexpected pathways, so I don’t have defenses against them. Clichés are defenses, bulwarks shored up against unexpected thinking. Some of the most destructive political moves that I’m seeing right now are inherently, violently cliché, coming out of threadbare self-consuming ideologies.

I value art that pulls down the defense-system and goes: Oh look. In small subtle delicate ways or in larger bolder ones. Art doesn’t have to be “political” in the most blatant forms in order to be conducting these operations. Often it’s more effective if it sort of comes in sideways. Either way, the more it can inject possibility into our thinking, the more we can see ourselves and each other with new capacity. And change occurs where there is capacity.

MER: Your body of work is so diverse! Novels, essays, plays. There’s something radical in how you move across genres, borders and formats, shapeshifting as a writer. How does your fiction writing and your TV and film work connect to your work for the stage? Does this connect to what you have called an “aesthetics of fluidity” when we spoke a few years back?

JS: What draws me to a story doesn’t necessarily change with the genre or medium. But each form provides a different access point for a reader, or viewer, or audience member. So part of what interests me when I’m turning a new project over in my mind is the question of intimacy. How much do I need a visual language, or duration, or physical proximity, or the ability to read a character’s mind? What are the tools that will best serve the story? And then from there, the form coalesces, and as the story progresses, it tries to make the best use of its form.

MER: Oh, that makes so much sense! Creating intimacy and responding to, even exploring, legacies of damage, and paradox through inventive storytelling recurs across your body of work, often landing powerfully in final moments of the narrative and medium in new ways: How do you create intimacy with audiences for performance in particular?

JS: That’s a great question. I think it’s an ongoing investigation, for each piece, always. My overall sense is that you do it by inviting an audience into the theatre and making them feel that the invitation is a real one. Humor is an invitation. Rich, compelling characters are an invitation. Pleasure and honesty are different kinds of invitations. There are lots of ways to do it, but I’m not interested in making an audience uncomfortable in a hostile way—pointing a punishing finger at them, or something. If someone has actually left their home to come and sit with us, I want them to feel like the play really wants them there. And from there intimacy can occur—even if the play ends up taking them into places where they’re less comfortable.

​​JSM: What piece from your body of work would you recommend theatre scholars, artists, and educators engage with beyond your works for the stage?

JS: My second novel, There’s Going To Be Trouble, engages with the theatrical and the political in the form of two seductions. It tells the story of a young man enmeshed in the Harvard student protests of the late 60s and, fifty years later, his daughter in the roiling street protests of Paris. Both fall in love with radical activists, inside very different frameworks of belief, and find themselves drawn toward the euphoric urgency of radicalization. And eventually, father and daughter are forced to encounter each other in the present, across an ideological divide: a man who’s given up on the world after having committed a horrifying and shameful act in the name of progress, and the daughter who is falling in love with the idea of changing the world, no matter the cost—but who finds herself increasingly proximal to the violence that comes with that phrase, “no matter the cost.”

MER: Thank you for your extraordinary writing, your intelligence, your range. It’s been a gift to talk about your work, discover what you’re up to, and how you think about writing for the stage, queer writing, and the value of paradoxes.