Alumna's tragi-comic drama marks theater's twentieth birthday
The Tooth Fairy, a G.I. Joe action figure, and a transvestite flight attendant. They all play key roles in God's Ear, an avant-garde play by Jenny Schwartz '95. Last fall, as part of an effort to bring distinguished theater alumni back to campus in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Cornell mounted the unorthodox drama in the center's Class of '56 Flexible Theatre.
The play chronicles the anguish of losing a child and the strain it places on a young couple's marriage, blending the hallucinatory and the humorous with the tragic. The opening scene combines three separate conversations and locales, blurring the lines between past, present, and fantastical. Schwartz casts time, space, and convention aside in a script that concentrates less on plot and more on how language is an insufficient expression of pain. "I set out to deal with the subjects of grief and estrangement in a way that felt honest," says the New York City-based playwright. "I tried to create a world of words with its own logic and vocabulary."
A theater major at Cornell, Schwartz earned an MFA in directing at Columbia. After working mostly as a director, she shifted her focus to playwriting. God's Ear has played Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre and is currently being produced in Seattle and Boise, Idaho. "Jenny is at the beginning of a career that is limited only by her multiple talents," says David Feldshuh, the Schwartz Center's artistic director and her longtime mentor. "If she keeps her focus on playwriting, she will become an interesting and important voice."
— Aeriel Emig '09