{"id":32669,"date":"2016-03-10T01:21:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T07:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=32669"},"modified":"2025-10-24T07:01:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T14:01:15","slug":"based-on-a-true-story-the-versatile-elaine-jarvik-plays-it-where-it-lays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/based-on-a-true-story-the-versatile-elaine-jarvik-plays-it-where-it-lays\/","title":{"rendered":"Based on a True Story: The Versatile Elaine Jarvik Plays It Where It Lays"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I had forgotten she plays the drums. Or that she once wrote the Itty Bitty Salt Lake City feature for the Deseret News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Amazing what you discover while researching a piece on someone you thought you already knew a lot about.<\/p>\n

Elaine Jarvik is a woman of numerous talents: 27 years as a writer with the local LDS Church-owned newspaper, followed by a stint doing a few stories for The Salt Lake Tribune<\/em>, all alongside a successful career as a playwright \u2013 her latest, \u201cBased on a True Story,\u201d sold out before rehearsals even began. I mean, who does that?<\/p>\n

She won\u2019t lay claim to the title \u201creporter\u201d because \u201cI\u2019ll ask questions, but I\u2019m not really great at digging out information,\u201d she says; but will accept \u201cfeature writer\u201d since that\u2019s precisely what she did so well for so long. Who knows how many successful productions it will take before she\u2019s willing to call herself a playwright? \u201cI still have a little nametag they gave me at Humana [Festival of New American Plays] that says \u2018Elaine Jarvik \u00a0. . . \u00a0Playwright\u2019 and I keep that where I can see it every day,\u201d she says with a quick laugh.<\/p>\n

But she does<\/em> dig when she writes features and is known for digging deep. I still vividly recall her 1995 story about \u201cThe Little Lama Who Loves Power Rangers\u201d \u2013 a Bountiful first-grader who was the 23rd reincarnation of an important Tibetan religious figure. He would soon leave Utah to train in a monastery far, far away, giving up the American toys (all but one) he loved so dearly.<\/p>\n

Another starts like this:<\/p>\n

The robe is black, with a rope around the waist and fabric that drapes voluminously through the sleeves. So now, as Mike Zimmerman stands before his teacher and prepares to sit, he must arrange the robe just so, folding and tucking and folding some more.<\/span><\/p>\n

He once was chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court. In those days he wore a different black robe, but that was then and this is now, and, as any Buddhist knows, then is not so important. In those days he sat on the bench. Now he is sitting, cross-legged, on the floor.<\/p>\n

In his deep, serious voice he begins: “Goso said, ‘To give an example, it is like a buffalo passing through a window. The head, the horns and the four legs have already passed through, but the tail has not. Why is it that the tail cannot?”<\/p>\n

In Zen Buddhism, this is called a\u00a0koan \u2014\u00a0<\/em>the kind of inscrutable paradox most famously expressed in the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How does she DO that? You want to read on and on and on. And, of course, you will.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jarvik truly likes going deeper into any religion and just about any other subject she comes across. She prefers longer-form stories, creative nonfiction. \u201cI like just the writing part of it,\u201d she states firmly.<\/p>\n

While she was growing up in Maryland, her mother worked for the Department of the Army in their marksmanship program affiliated with the NRA and her father was an economist with the Commerce Department in Washington, D.C. Jake Levin was also a poet whose work infrequently appeared in The New York Times<\/em> and who wrote gags for cartoonists just for fun as well as quips \u2013 Nepotism: putting on heirs \u2013 that were often published in the Wall Street Journal <\/em>and Saturday Evening Post<\/em>. He encouraged his daughter to compose a few poems when she was 7 or 8 and then put them in a scrapbook for her \u2013 Jarvik\u2019s earliest experience as a published writer.<\/p>\n

Later in life, at Syracuse University in New York, she changed her journalism major after discovering she was too shy to do interviews. (These days, she says, \u201cI\u2019m a little awkward; I don\u2019t think I\u2019m shy.\u201d) Diploma in hand, she considered the Peace Corps, \u201cbut I would have been a disaster,\u201d and decided on the prestigious master\u2019s program in journalism at Illinois\u2019 Northwestern University, despite previous reservations about the field. \u201cI knew how to write,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIn high school I realized that even if I didn\u2019t understand what I was talking about I could make it sound good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At Northwestern, assigned to interview congressional delegates in Washington, D.C., she discovered, \u201cI really do love writing. I will write anything<\/em>,\u201d she says with a smile, making the analogy that she loves to play the drums: \u201cI will play any kind of music as long as I get to play the drums.\u201d \u00a0She has played for 25 years.<\/p>\n

After a newspaper job in Washington, she married and moved to Italy where her now ex-husband, Robert Jarvik of artificial heart fame, attended medical school. They would later move to Utah and have the two children he has not seen in decades. Those events eventually led to a play, (\u201ca man enters\u201d), written by Jarvik with their artist\/author daughter Kate Jarvik Birch, produced in 2011 at Salt Lake Acting Company. (Birch lives a few houses down the street from her mother; son Tyler is in Portland. Grandchildren range in age from 8 to 20.) \u201cI don\u2019t know why I stayed here,\u201d Jarvik muses. \u201cBut I\u2019m kind of the victim of inertia, fear of change: kids in school, friends. I am not LDS but went to work for the Deseret News <\/em>and felt part of this culture. They treated me really well. This whole state has treated me very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the News,<\/em> Jarvik only worked full time for about a year and a half until the birth of her son, then freelanced for nine years before returning to the paper full time. She also worked for the now-defunct Utah Holiday<\/em> magazine and currently writes profiles for the U\u2019s Continuum.<\/em> An inveterate freelancer, she likes being productive (trying to write something every morning) and spent six months last year working on a book on the Vietnam war.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jarvik used to write longhand, when the children were small, because her manual typewriter was noisy and would wake them. \u201cI thought I would never be able to compose on a typewriter. Now, I can\u2019t think through a pen.\u201d Today she uses a computer, a Mac Air, but says she is a very slow writer. \u201cI labor at it.\u201d And she deletes a lot.<\/p>\n

She always wanted a desk by a window, too. Now that she has one, Jarvik has discovered that when you write, \u201cyou really don\u2019t look out the window all that much.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collaborative effort with her daughter was not Jarvik\u2019s first play. After thinking she would like to write the book to a musical based on a newspaper story she had written \u201cabout missed connections, like \u2018I Saw You\u2019 in the back of City Weekly,<\/em>\u201d she started reading books about playwriting \u201cand was basically self-taught\u201d early on. She took a workshop at SLAC around 2004 from noted New York-based playwright J.T. Rogers. With encouragement and help from Robert Benjamin, a high school friend who ended up a physicist in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and also writes plays, she began working on a form called the 10-Minute Play. Her short work, \u201cDead Right,\u201d about a person wondering what someone would say about them in their obituary, was one of four plays selected out of more than 1,200 submissions at the 2008 Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. It has since been published in a textbook, The Bedford Introduction to Literature,<\/em>where it shares company with playwrights such as Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. \u201cDead Right\u201d has now been produced in some10 states and Canada. \u201cThe Coming Ice Age,\u201d a prequel to that play, about the person who was in the obituary, was produced by Pygmalion Theatre Company in 2010.<\/p>\n

A year ago December, Jarvik wrote \u201cMarry Christmas,\u201d for Plan-B, about what it felt like to people she interviewed to get married during that 17-day window when same-sex marriage became legal in Utah after the state\u2019s Amendment 3 was declared unconstitutional. It was creative nonfiction for the theater. \u201cPeople already know the outcome so you have to tell it in an engaging way,\u201d says the playwright.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTwo Stories,\u201d for SLAC last February, was another play about \u201cthings that get under my skin,\u201d she says. There were two threads to the story. One follows a journalist, a feature writer, natch, afraid she is going to lose her job. The other is about \u201cpeople who build monster houses and block the view of somebody next door. So it\u2019s about privacy and who gets to control what and who gets to control the story you\u2019re telling,\u201d says the playwright. We reviewed it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jarvik explains that her current play at Plan-B, \u201cBased on a True Story,\u201d is about trying \u201cto understand faith and comfort\u201d \u2014Jarvik is a non-believer but attends the nearby Presbyterian church, where she enjoys the sense of community, playing the drums, and the \u201cincredible sermons of Pastor and poet Scott Dalgarno, being reminded each week to be a better person.\u201d It\u2019s also about time travel. The story takes place in 2046, after a malfunction in a time machine that was supposed to let you go backwards. The intake worker at the shelter where Megan ends up in the future on a search for her husband is a guy named Chuck with troubles of his own.<\/p>\n

Asked what it\u2019s like to give her play over to a director, Jarvik says, \u201cI like to have control, so it\u2019s hard, but I trust these people completely, so that\u2019s not the problem. For me, the problem is that I\u2019m always dissatisfied with my own work so I start seeing what I would like to have changed \u2013 and it\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know the director and actors understand my plays better than I do.\u201d She says that their interpretations can sometimes surprise her. \u201cThat\u2019s how theater works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Later, while pondering what her favorite feature story of all time might be (we ask the most insightful questions, don\u2019t we?) Jarvik mentions an incredible windstorm that occurred one Christmas \u201caround the time Sony was hacked. And garbage cans were blown over and people\u2019s stuff, their secrets, got spread all over the neighborhood. I picked up a lot of it and put it back into the cans. Think of it: nature hacking people\u2019s secrets. There\u2019s got to be a play there . . . \u201c<\/p>\n

The ever-imaginative Elaine Jarvik is on another role.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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