We Should Kill Him

Jacob Juntunen




From 2014 to 2017, I was fortunate to study at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Department of Theater under Dr. Jacob Juntunen who helped mold and strengthen whatever modest powers I have as a playwright. In the fall of 2018, I performed in the SIU production of his play In The Shadow Of His Language. His other play, Hath Taken Away, will be performed at Ball State University in Indiana from October 15-20th. Jacob will appear at a talkback on the 19th. I decided it would be fun to interview Jacob about his current production for this here blog.

RORY: So Jacob, tell us a bit about Hath Taken Away.

JACOB: Hath Taken Away is about Dorothea, a 20-year-old Evangelical Christian in the Midwest who is recently married. Her faith is tested by a health crisis that threatens her life, marriage and child to be.

It's told in a spiral structure with poetic, lyrical language.

RORY: So where did the inspiration for this play come from?

JACOB: From a few places. First, just before writing it I suffered a loss of someone close to me. Next, I have always struggled with "the problem of evil" that is, why do bad things happen to good people?

For me, no text tackles that question better than the Book of Job.

So, for my play, I took the Book of Job as an inspiration, made Job's wife the protagonist, and set it in the modern Midwest.

Finally, in my role as a professor at Southern Illinois University, I met a number of young Evangelical Christians from rural Illinois and Missouri. I was struck that this was a diversity that had not been taken seriously onstage.

Part of the play's mission was to represent this rather large minority of the U.S. population.

Weave all that together and you get Hath Taken Away.

RORY: I was going to ask more about that yeah. I know you originally hail from California and you married someone from the East Coast so uh, is the Midwest a bit exotic to you?

JACOB: Hah! Yeah. I'm from the Bay Area in California and spent the 1990s in Portland, for real, and then moved to Chicago from 2001-11. I also had long stints in Poland.

But the (rural) Midwest was new for me.

I think what surprised me most though was how diverse this area of the country is. I mean, Chicago is diverse, but I met more interracial couples, trans people and people of all sorts of intersectional diversity (trans Evangelicals etc.) in Southern Illinois and Missouri than I ever did in more "liberal" areas.

That complexity, I suppose, drove me to write Hath Taken Away, to try to understand this type of person in a multifaceted way.

RORY: Like most theatre artists, your politics are reasonably left of center. But knowing this play, while it's not explicit, I tend to infer that these characters would vote to Make America Great Again, if they voted. So I wonder, how did you summon the empathy and perspective to write characters so clearly different from yourself?

JACOB: Yeah, that's a really important question.

These characters are absolutely conservative Christians with views that are very different from mine.

That said, in regards to current politics, I think they would have sat out 2016 because neither candidate represented them, but that probably isn't that relevant to the play.

More important, I think most theatre artists would agree that diverse representation is important for the stage.

I often write from a point of view that isn't mine, whether that's gender, race, sexuality etc.

So to write characters with different politics/religious views from me wasn't terribly different.

What has been more interesting has been the reaction.

I've had theaters explicitly tell me they're passing on the script because of the characters' religion. Likewise, I've had audiences in talkbacks after readings say they can't relate to the characters because they're Evangelical.

It's been interesting then, that I could get into these characters' heads, but audiences have had a harder time. I should also say that this isn't universal, when the play had a reading at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the audience was very receptive.

RORY: Can you talk a bit about the play's development and production history?

JACOB: I wrote the play while I was Head of the Playwriting MFA at SIU so its first readings were with student actors and directors. I usually do that with my new work so that the playwrights I teach can see my process up close.

After that it had a few readings:

The Last Frontier, Chicago Dramatists, Will Greer's Theatricum Botanicum, Great Plains Theatre Conference and the Playwright's Center. All of those were really helpful.

I then worked with SIU students to do a workshop production in an abandoned church in the middle of fields a few miles outside Carbondale. We produced that under the auspices of Contraband Theatre and that allowed me to take a script that was pretty polished from lots of music stand readings and see it in three dimensions.

I was really happy with how that turned out.

RORY: How did the Ball State production come about?

JACOB: The director, Sarah King, who is a junior undergraduate, found the script on New Play Exchange.

(This is a website where playwrights can post scripts and where potential producers can find them)

RORY: Nice! Very encouraging for playwrights who use NPX!

JACOB: Yes! Yay for NPX! Sarah and I have emailed some as she's been in rehearsals, and it's exciting to me because the religion of the characters is something that drew her to the script.

RORY: Other than furthering the diversity of perspectives not usually seen onstage what are you hoping audiences take away from this show?

JACOB: I'm hoping that audiences see themselves in it somehow, if not in the characters' religion/politics, then in the mourning these characters have. Each of these characters has lost family in different ways, and at least as I see it, are blameless. I hope this play both confronts people with the fact that sometimes awful things happen to innocent people, and provides a thoughtful emotional journey through that insoluble problem.

RORY: Is there much thematic connection between this play and some of your other work?

JACOB: A lot of my plays have protagonists that lose family in one way or another. I think all of my plays have protagonists that are struggling with a crisis of faith, be it about their religion, ideology or faith in an institution.

RORY: Speaking of other work, what are you working on now?

JACOB: I'm currently working on a play called A Genocide Of Our Own. It involves a chorus of historians trying to understand what really happened at a Native American massacre in what is now Colorado. A U.S. Cavalry officer is trying to convince them he acted heroically. Simultaneously, a professor at a school founded by the Governor of the Colorado Territories at the time of the massacre is trying to understand if he is benefiting in the present from the past horror.

I have a solid draft and will start sending it to development organizations soon.

RORY: So what can you say about your aforementioned day job of running the Playwriting program at SIU of which I am obviously an alum? You've been doing it seven or eight years now?

JACOB: I've been doing it since Fall 2012 and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity. The Theater graduate program has an MFA in most areas except acting and each area usually takes 1 person a year. So it's a tight-knit community which I think benefits everyone, and also means that everyone is funded so graduate students can dedicate themselves to their crafts.

For playwrights in particular there is a lot of time to write. Students usually teach theatre history or playwriting to receive their funding and once a month the program produces an evening of original short plays for the public. Once a year, there is a new play festival that includes a full-length play from each graduate playwright and a full production of the graduating MFA's thesis script.

RORY: What kind of satisfaction would you say you get out of being a mentor to fledgling playwrights?

JACOB: There are two types.

The first is very selfish. Since I spend a great deal of time one on one with the playwrights talking about their plays, it improves my own ability to write plays greatly.

The second, because again, it's a small program and I get to know the playwrights well, it really is a joy seeing the progress from the plays I receive in their applications to their thesis productions. I try very hard to develop their voices and not have them write like me. When that is successful and a playwright learns the technique to create a script that fulfills their ambitions...well that is very satisfying.

RORY: Thanks for taking the time to talk to Far Off Loop!

JACOB: You're welcome!


https://www.bsu.edu/calendar/events/academics/theatre-and-dance/2019/10/15/hath-taken-away