{"id":65914,"date":"2022-11-03T11:05:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T17:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=65914"},"modified":"2022-11-07T11:30:50","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T17:30:50","slug":"no-longer-waiting-for-someone-to-let-her-in-an-interview-with-playwright-julie-jensen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/no-longer-waiting-for-someone-to-let-her-in-an-interview-with-playwright-julie-jensen\/","title":{"rendered":"No Longer Waiting for Someone to Let Her In: An Interview with Playwright Julie Jensen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I have known Julie Jensen\u2019s work ever since I came to Utah over 30 years ago, and we have been members together of the Playwrights Lab at Plan-B Theatre for a number of years now but this interview with her was the first time I learned about her journey as a playwright.<\/h4>\n

Julie started out in theatre as an actor, but became frustrated with having to wait for someone to \u201clet me in.\u201d After college, she was auditioning for a Shakespeare festival in California and said to herself, \u201cIf I don\u2019t get this, I\u2019m going to do something else.\u201d She didn\u2019t get it, and so she decided to turn to writing \u2013 because \u201cyou don\u2019t need anyone\u2019s permission\u201d to do that.<\/h4>\n

She found that for some reason she was always writing plays, maybe because she started out as an actor. She tried writing in other genres, but then the characters would start talking \u2013 \u201cand then there it goes,\u201d she\u2019d be writing a play instead of a story.<\/h4>\n

She saw teaching as a way to make a living and still write. Her BA and MA are in English and she taught dramatic literature in a college English department for 12 years \u2013 dramatic literature is, after all, still literature – \u201cbut it was always theatre.\u201d She ended up with a PhD in theatre from Wayne State University in Michigan.<\/h4>\n

Then there was a stint in Hollywood, but \u201cI couldn\u2019t quite figure out how to do TV.\u201d She returned to playwriting, won a \u201cbig\u201d contest and eventually was hired by UNLV to run their graduate program in playwriting. She said the job was \u201cheaven \u2013 but unfortunately you had to live in hell\u201d (Las Vegas, that is). She got a grant and came to SLC as part of the grant requirements \u2013 and ended up staying even after the grant ended.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Colleen Baum as Annie Adams in Julie Jensen’s “Mother, Mother” (Photo courtesy Pygmalion Theatre Company)<\/p><\/div>\n

Julie\u2019s new play, Mother, Mother: The Many Mothers of Maude<\/em>, opens on November 4th at the Rose Wagner. The play is about Annie Adams, an actress from Utah who is mostly known today as the mother of Maude Adams \u2014 was one of the best known (and highest paid) actresses of the early twentieth century. Among many other leading roles, Maude was the original Peter Pan on Broadway. She got her start in theatre through her mother \u2013 beginning when she was just two months old \u2013 and for a time toured with Annie through the mining camps and start-up towns of the West. Julie says, \u201cMost of what happens in this play happened in fact \u2014 the rest of it could have.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Julie was drawn to Annie\u2019s story for a couple of reasons. First, she writes with a Western point of view, and Annie\u2019s story is mainly set in the West: Annie\u2019s father was a polygamist, she grew up in Salt Lake City, and Brigham Young helped her get her first roles. But mostly, she identifies with Annie\u2019s desire to be a professional in a world that didn\u2019t want to let her in, to have a career in theatre. She saw \u201cthe struggle of it all\u201d as a reflection of \u201cmy own struggle with my own career.\u201d<\/h4>\n

If you\u2019re writing about women, you\u2019re probably going to end up writing about mothers and daughters and there are two pairs in the play: Annie and her mother, Julia, and Annie and her daughter, Maude. Julie sees some of her own mother in the central character of Annie. \u201cMy mother was incredibly ambitious, probably would have wanted to be a college educator, but she lived in Beaver, and no one cared about what she cared about.\u201d She watched her mother getting older and not achieving what she would have liked to have achieved, and some of that ended up in the play.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Nicole Finney as Maude Adams, Barb Gandy as Julia Ann Adams and Colleen Baum as Annie Adams. (photo courtesy Pygmalion Theatre Company)<\/p><\/div>\n

Writing the play was itself a bit of a struggle. She had been working on it for a while and then ran into a piece of research that threw her for a loop. \u201cI discovered that Annie had an affair with a senator, who was married and had two kids.\u201d And on top of that, he had an established mistress, who also had children by him. When the mistress found out about Annie, she shot and killed the senator. And Julie said to herself \u201cI don\u2019t want to write about that.\u201d She feared the shooting would dominate the story, so it would be all about what the men are doing and what happens to the men. She put the play aside until she could figure out how to keep the focus on the women.<\/h4>\n

At some point she realized that the mistress shooting the senator was like something out of the 19th-century\u2019s theatrical tropes, and that became the way to approach the story. The play is modern in its sensibilities, but the language has 19th-century inflections. And the male characters \u2014 all played by a single actor \u2014 are more like stock characters from a melodrama, unlike the women, who are fully drawn, complicated individuals.
\nAnd like much (all?) of Julie\u2019s writing, the play is mordantly funny. I couldn\u2019t resist asking where her sense of humor came from, and Julie\u2019s answer was unexpected:<\/h4>\n

\u201cMy sister. She\u2019s the funniest person I know, wickedly funny, and I\u2019m usually the butt of her humor. What she says is pithy, and true, and she\u2019s also really brave, a lot braver than I am. So I write in her voice a lot.\u201d<\/h4>\n


\nMother, Mother<\/em> is being produced by PYGmalion Productions and runs from November 4th through November 19th, Fridays through Sundays, at the Rose Wagner. Masks are required for two performances (on Nov 10th and 17th); for all other performances, masks are recommended but not required. Ticket info is available at www.saltlakecountyarts.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have known Julie Jensen\u2019s work ever since I came to Utah over 30 years ago, and we have been members together of the Playwrights Lab at Plan-B Theatre for a number of years now but this interview with her was the first time I learned about her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1717,"featured_media":65922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/julie-jensen.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 01:45:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1717"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65914"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65923,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914\/revisions\/65923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}