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The Play

Our Concept

You on the Moors Now is an ecstatically violent rebellion that escalates to a tragic and irreparable end. The binary of "Men" and "Women" is weaponized and codified by an endless repetition of its performance. Reconciliation doesn't yield healing. 

—  Katie Brook, director

By magnifying the play's war, we're hoping to critique  the pervasiveness and senselessness of violence as well as the cyclical harm created by the gender binary and patriarchy. 

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Style

This play is a satire, not only critiquing the sexist and classist structures that the novels themselves are criticizing, but also the larger modern context of binary gender essentialism. The primary elements of satire are attack, judgment, wit, humor, and intent. You can read more about the applications of these elements here

We're drawing upon aspects of melodrama, which originated during the time that these novels were written. Similar to the content we're working with, the stories often reflected the importance of marriage, revolution, and industrialization. In our use of melodrama, the focus is on creating a common physical language. 

Premiere

Theater Reconstruction Ensemble developed You on the Moors Now and presented its premiere Off-off-Broadway at HERE Arts Center in 2015. Below are some quotes from

an interview before its opening:

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"I was trying to find my initial entry point into the play. I did not want the text to live as a mashup entirely, but more as a portal where all of these characters could find themselves ... Somewhere in there, I found my in: each of the heroines turns their back on someone who loves them. That's when it all kicked into high gear!"

— Playwright, Jaclyn Backhaus (she/her)

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"These stories have ultimately defined and structured our society's idealized process of falling in love. By reading them we have all imagined (and romanticized) what love should and could be. This play breaks apart that process of reading a love story and theatricalizes our own process of then restructuring the pieces into a new love story."

— Director, John Kurzynowski (he/him)

About The Playwright

Jaclyn Backhaus is a playwright, educator, arts facilitator, and mother. Her plays include Wives (Playwrights Horizons), India Pale Ale (2018 Horton Foote Prize, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Men On Boats (Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons). She is one of five Creative Directors of of the process-based arts facilitation group Fresh Ground Pepper, and she is one of the fourteen members of the current cohort of The Kilroys, a bicoastal collective that celebrates women, trans, and nonbinary presence in the American theater landscape. She is a Lincoln Center Playwright-in-Residence, and she was once a 2016 Tow Playwright Resident with Clubbed Thumb. She got a BFA from NYU, where she now teaches some skillsets of playwriting to brilliant students. She resides in Ridgewood, Queens, with her husband Andrew J. Scoville, a theater director, and their son Ernie. Currently, she is writing nothing and reading everything. Send her book recs at jaclynbackhaus.com 

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— Biography from New Dramatists

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