Jennifer Gibbs, Writer and Performer

 

Jennifer Gibbs

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Jennifer Gibbs

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m happy to be here today with Jennifer Gibbs. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Thanks.

 

Jennifer Gibbs  00:16

Will. I’m happy to be here conversing with you. So

 

Will Bachman  00:21

Jennifer, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Jennifer Gibbs  00:27

Wow, seems like yesterday. Have I had a journey? I would say my journey has been the journey of a woman and an artist who’s kept working in the entertainment field and who then became a mother who kept working. And so it’s kind of a creator’s journey, if I could nutshell it. After immediately after graduation, I was enrolled in a PhD program at NYU in comparative literature with an emphasis on performance and the female, the embodiment of the female and the feminine in various public ways. How we staged that culturally. And so I moved to New York, and I was in that graduate program, while also beginning my career as a professional theater actor and a playwright. And in those days that did not go over so well in the more straight laced, traditional world of the Comparative Literature, doctoral, you know, department, and so those were the days when it was kind of like, stay in your lane. And I’m someone who’s always been a very multidisciplinary thinker and creator. So for me, that pursuit of Comparative Literature and academia, that whole world, for me, was an aspect of what I was thinking about, what I was making as a generative artist, which of course, always comes from the core of who we are as People, what we’re confronting in culture, experientially, spiritually. So, you know, that was an interesting way to kind of embark on a life in New York City as a creator. I ended up being cast in some Off, off Broadway shows, and then a bona fide off Broadway show, getting my, you know, actors, equity card, and then being cast in a Broadway national tour, quite young. While I was still in graduate school and taking time away to I was I had a fellowship, the Mellon Fellowship, for it was a teaching fellowship for graduate work at that time which prohibited me from working in any professional capacity to earn money other because the fellowship pays you to go to school, or it did at that time, and it also paid a stipend of a grand total of $13,500 as I will recall, for the academic year, which was supposed to somehow support me in New York City, so that I was required not to have another job. I was I was prohibited by the Mellon Foundation from taking on additional work. I was supposed to focus entirely on my studies, so I would take time off from from school and the fellowship to take these acting jobs and so that I wouldn’t break the, you know, the boundary of the requirement imposed on me. And by the, by the by the Fellowship, which was so generous, and I was so grateful to have it, but that became a bit of a merry go round, and I ended up, after turning in my master’s thesis and defending the thesis, deciding to just focus full time on acting and writing for the theater, because I felt at that juncture, I had to make a choice. And there wasn’t a ton of support in academia for people who were approaching things in that multidisciplinary way with regard to performance. So then I worked for the next Gosh, how old was I? 2526 at the time, 25 maybe 26 so I worked for the next decade in the theater, which was my love, mainly acting and making, collaboratively, making and acting in others, you know, shows in New York City, and writing my own plays, doing workshops and readings of those plays. And midway through my 30s, although not in the way one might expect, I became a mother, and that journey took about five years where my I was changing a lot physically, because I had a series of unexpected pregnancy losses and sort of a period of serial grief that I went through that involved in a terrible stroke of bad luck, two stillbirths of almost full term babies that were completely unrelated, and so that as an actor, when your body is changing that dramatically and visually and people expect you to be showing up with a newborn anytime soon, it, you know, for me, it didn’t Feel like a great time to be performing and auditioning when most of that five years I was looking visibly pregnant, so I transitioned during that time to focusing mainly on my writing, and that was really a fulfilling time for me. I was, you know, leaning into grief, leaning into specifically grief and motherhood, leaning into what it meant to me to be a woman grieving through my work, and that work resulted in it was very fruitful, very collaborative work that resulted in me being in residence with a great downtown theater company called the here Arts Center. I was an artist in residence for a couple years, I think between 38 to 40, where I was developing with the artistic director there, Kristen Martin, who’s a real visionary for this kind of interdisciplinary work. I was developing a play called sounding, which integrated, you know, film, new music, lyrics that I was writing and scene work. So it was a multi disciplinary live performance, which was a great, great experience. And it had its it had its world premiere there three weeks before my son Liam was born. So my son Liam was born when I was 40, and he is 14 today, and in ninth grade, so that that was the start of my kind of a different kind of motherhood for me, and a different kind of relationship to my work. And during that period, I was our family was relocating to Los Angeles for work, kind of bouncing back and forth between LA and New York. And I had always been a theater artist, but but also very I was raised as a visual artist by my father, who was a sculptor of some stature, as these things go. And having grown up as a visual artist, I guess I thought very much visually and for me, it was very important as a writer for the theater to be able to use any kind of visual medium I could. So when we began to relocate, and I was away from what is arguably our nation’s epicenter of theater work, New York, I I became interested in, for the first time, writing for television and writing for the screen in a serious way, and so in my early 40s, I taught myself how to I started creating at the suggestion of actually an executive at HBO who I was meeting with. She her name’s Francesca Orsi, and. She is a genius, and she really is truly a visionary in terms of development. So she was encouraging me to develop my own, to create my own television series, and I took a leap not knowing how to write for television, and I gave it a go with her support, and I found I really loved it, because it really, it felt to me like it was hitting the sweet spot of where I wanted to be and where I needed to be as a creator during that time. So, you know, for the last I would say, you know, decade I’ve been writing not just new plays, but also creating, writing new television worlds. And, you know, starting to learn how to pitch them, and I’ve been figuring out how to recently, I start a very small, independent production company which is functioning more like a studio, with the aim of empowering, specifically women creators to get work done that otherwise might not be produced in the film and television or in the, as we call it, multi platform arena now, because I perceive that that’s what’s most interesting to me in in media, it’s not so much. It’s a story that can unfold across various distribution platforms. The most recent story I’m working on so that’s a long way towards saying that I’ve always been highly interdisciplinary. I’ve always been highly driven by my connection to my work, and that that work is personal. And most recently, I’ve started a business to do that for to independently produce that kind of interdisciplinary work for myself and for others. So the first project we’re producing is called riot mom, and it is a multi platform universe story that unfolds on an audio platform. Multi media sort of, I would call it online interactive platform, a Live platform and a television platform. That’s, that’s a mouthful. I’m sorry.

 

Will Bachman  12:40

Never, never apologize. What a what a full life you’ve been living. So many things I’d like to follow up about one you mentioned your dad briefly here tell us a little bit about how did you learn from your dad? What did you learn from him? You know, did he bring you into the studio? And kind of you did you make some sculptures yourself? Did he teach you to see things that you might not otherwise have seen? Tell us a little bit about how you learned kind of visual intelligence from from your father,

 

Jennifer Gibbs  13:25

okay, how to answer all that well? So he, he came of age in the late 60s as a as an artist, and he

 

Will Bachman  13:42

what’s his name? I’m sorry,

 

Jennifer Gibbs  13:44

Tom Gibbs, so, so he was a Midwest based artist. He was one of the Chicago sculptors. There was a mini movement for those who keep track of contemporary sculpture, which they’re the, probably the top point 1% of the world, but so so he was a Chicago sculptor who had come of age in the 60s. He was mentored by a German sculptor named Walter Arno, who was out of Hamburg and we had been living in work. He had been living and working in Germany with me and my mom when I was a toddler. So he and Arno had Arno went by his last name, shared a studio there, and when my father brought us all back to the states to start his own real life as a sculptor. He kind of brought that calm, that that that that esthetic and that approach, which was unusual for even in those days, but it was an approach toward self fabrication of one’s own work. So he. Was making large scale. You know what people call architectural sculpture, but like these are pieces that are 2530, feet high. They weigh many, many tons. They’re made of steel, cast bronze. They’re made of granite. These are structures that are incredibly dangerous to fabricate on one’s own, alone in a studio, and so you usually have a couple of assistants around. But so so Arno was a sculptor who very much insisted on fabricating his own work, and that was a part of the esthetic. So my father felt very connected to that, and brought that back with him to settle near Chicago, right across the river in Iowa, about two and a half hours in his hometown, because he knew how to build a studio that had that kind of that he knew how to weld his own cranes. He was a certified bridge welder. You have to learn a lot of skills to be able to make large scale, fabricate large scale, monumental, like industrial work, right? So he was a certified bridge welder who had trained in a number of ways, and he knew how to do cast bronze. He built his own, you know, foundry and bronze casting area, and you name it, he built it. He didn’t just buy cranes, because you’re an artist, you can’t buy cranes. You have to build them yourself. So he welded up his own crane so that the cranes could lift the metal so that he could weld in place and a bunch of other things. So I saw him, pardon me, build his universe from scratch, and he did it in an area of His own town during the death of industry. So in the 70s, as factories were dying as industrial you know, the industrial economy went on the skids in the 80s and in the mid to late 70s. What he was doing is going to auction, buying up tool and die machinery that they tossed out all these kind of these kinds of like ancient or outmoded technologies that were highly, highly industrial. He got for a song, and he was able to set up this two incredible studios on our property, which we built together as a family from scratch. He with help from his other sculptor friends, who themselves were building studios that he would help build, right? So these were large. So he built his large scale metal working Studio on a on an old limestone foundry bed on four acres of farmland property that he purchased for the purpose of building the studio. And then he had a smaller limestone barn structure that we rebuilt, which was his drawing and modeling and woodworking studio. So he had two studios on our property. There was a winding gravel road, and then we had a farmhouse at the top. It was sort of a hilly, sort of pasture land type place in the middle of the city of Dubuque, Iowa. So it was one of those kind of little magical moments where you know he In other words, what I’m getting at is we built it. I was there. We were a family. He didn’t drive to a studio. It was there. So when I played, I played in the studio or around the studio. I was taught never to look at the bright blue light when he’s welding. It would burn my eyes. I would not be able to see. I was taught how to be safe. Never go near. You know, if something was hanging from a crane on the ceiling, don’t go near. You know I was I helped to travel cement. I watched how things were made and built, which is actually a very rare experience, although I was not aware at the time that that was something that most children didn’t have the opportunity to see. So was I in the studio? Yeah, I helped build the studio in as much as a nine year old can. But I thought I was right up in there. It was all me, will in my imagination, no doubt, no, no. Not even really in my imagination. So yeah, I was there, and then he would talk about the work with us. I would come home from school, we would stop into the studio, um, his sculpt, his assistant. Um, he had a steady assistant or two at all times, and he and friends would trade off with assistance. They would even trade off with helping out with metal casting and things that needed multiple, multiple hands. Um, so we had a kind of band of sculptor is at our house, some of them in an assistant position, and some of them, you know, colleagues from Chicago, and we would have these meals, you know, in the evenings, most evenings with, you know, Don noon, who is a sculptor now, and he was his assistant. And they would talk shop, and I would see what they were working on. I would have opinions. If my dad was working towards a gallery show in Chicago, he would sometimes say, you know, I’ve been thinking about, should it, should it be this or this? And he would show me, you know, the two options. And I would choose. He’d be like, you may be right, Jen, he’d weld it in place, you know? And yeah, you know, I did. I myself was a drawer. I of course, when you have a parent who is achieving something at a level that is arguably heroic, using skills that are clearly highly advanced and dangerous. You know, we weren’t just modeling clay. Let’s put it that way. So, you know, did I want to do sculpture? No, not a chance. But I loved drawing, and I loved painting because those things were mine, and so I would do those things nearby or in one of the studios,

 

Will Bachman  21:03

talk to me about doing a national Broadway tour. What was that life like? How did it compare with what you thought it might be like?

 

Jennifer Gibbs  21:14

Um, what was it like? It was exciting as How old was I? God, I was 2324 maybe I was making what felt to me like a lot of money as an actor. What did that feel like? Validating in the beginning, it was very workmanlike. I was working with people of stature. As a very young person, I learned a lot, especially from the technical staff, about what it takes to make a complex project like a circus really go And move from one place to the next, you know, the trucks, the setup, the breakdown, you know. And it is like a circus. So in a way, you’re a band of circus performers, and that that includes the the roadies, the techs, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re going to a new town. It, it sometimes it felt like we were going to a new town every day, though. That wasn’t the case. But it would be like, we step off the plane, and you’d be like, it’s Monday. Where are we? Is it Alabama, right? And, okay, it’s Alabama. And you’d get your bearings, and you go to the theater, and you know, everything you did socially, in a way, happened together in your little band, and so you’d hear the talk. And for me, what was interesting is that was my first opportunity to really listen to the stage manager mouth off about something that was going on technically, or hear the, you know, Lightboard operator, you know, comment on an aspect of the show. So for me to it was almost like a a crash course in self producing, directing, in everything, because everybody’s right there, and they’re all, they’re joking, they’ve had five beers, but they’re talking shop, you know. You know, out late every night playing darts, you know. And talking shop in one way or another was a really intense thing, you know, it was a crash course on how to be professional and how to draw boundaries between personal and professional in an industry where You bring your personal self to your work, you’re with a band of people who are meant to somehow quickly form a bond, be intimate, and put up a show as a collective and yet, and it’s like a family and yet, how do we Have those personal and those professional boundaries in this family is very interesting question, where are we vulnerable? How do we have healthy boundaries? It, you know, and that’s a lot to absorb and learn. You know, as a 24 year old, I think it’s an ongoing. It’s a challenge for anyone who works in theater or film or television in a deeply collaborative way, where you’re going away away from your family, from your home, from your friends, and all you know are these people, and you’re meant to get to know them extremely deeply, so that you can do this job and yet And yet. How do you keep a balance? So it was really, it was, it was a really intensive learning experience, and it was incredibly valuable. And I made, you know, lasting friendships with people I collaborated with after that in New York, and I’m very, very grateful for it.

 

Will Bachman  25:51

Losing a pregnancy can be just devastating. It’s miscarriage is something that, you know, adults don’t talk about that much, but you know couples that have experienced it, it’s it’s just it can be such a devastating thing. You mentioned that you worked on processing the grief of the two stillbirths through your work. Talk to us a bit about that period of your life, and how did you go about, you know, processing that and and, you know, managed to move forward. Yeah,

 

Jennifer Gibbs  26:34

well, interestingly, the project I was working on when the first stillbirth happened, and this was a stillbirth that was of a of a healthy child, and it was caused by, you know how they say, if you have an amniocentesis, you have only a 1% chance of having an issue that would cause you to lose your baby. A bad amniocentesis caused long term amniotic leakage, and I lost my child from the amniocentesis procedure, and the doctor apologized. And you know, if you’re, if you’re the 1% that that happens to it happens to you 100% you don’t just lose 1% of your baby. So, you know, it was, it felt like a kind of anomaly, and it was a shock. So it wasn’t like, Oh, we’re prepared. We’ve done genetic testing, and this is, you know, we gotta So, the project that I was working on at the time was a film, and that film, it turns out, was based on a kind of stage adaptation that I’d done of an Ibsen play, and that was the beginning. Let’s rewind to my early auditioning years in New York in my 20s, I’d met once with Andre Gregory. At the time he was casting Vanya on 42nd street. Now, Andre Gregory lived in Adam’s House, just like me in his days at Harvard, and just like me, his mentor was Adrian Kennedy. And so my audition for Vanya on 42nd street, well, a film that he did, which he developed after working for a very long time in his living room, you know, mounting his version of Vanya with a group of a band of actors, inviting people, occasionally serving food, working on it again. It was kind of like site specific, right? And he made it with Louis mall into a film. And so this was the film, and my audition was a two hour long conversation in a cafe with Andre Gregory the day after, I watched for the first time in my life, my Dinner With Andre, which is a two hour long, essentially conversation with Andre Gregory in a cafe between Wally Sean and Andre Gregory and he wore the same cardigan. I was just I, I just so, so I did not get that role, but what I did receive was a lot of support, encouragement and mentorship from Andre Gregory, who told me at that time, and I never forgot it, and this is going to fast forward true very soon. He said, My advice to you is do something that compels you make your own project. Do it now. Don’t wait for someone to say, Yes, do it wherever you can. Do it in your living room, which is how he developed Vanya. And at that time, I was thinking a lot about Ibsen. I’d always been obsessed with Ibsen, and I was like, he did check off. I’ll do Ibsen. Right? I. And and shortly after I had that meeting with him, Jeannie Simpson and I and a few others from heart from the Harvard, you know, Peter Hirsch from the the Harv Allison Weller from the Harvard theater community. We, we were all in New York, and, you know, we got together, and I was like, Let’s do Ipsen. Let’s do lady from the sea, which is this, like crazy Ibsen play that no one can figure out how to do, and it just like off the charts weird, and it’s so rarely produced. So we had been we spent two years doing that in my living room, and it was a glorious experience, and inviting people occasionally, and serving food, and the whole thing. So fast forward to me and my first stillbirth, and I was actually working on a film adaptation with a new collaborator, who was a filmmaker of that would try to capture the spirit of that first lady from the sea living room exploration of Ibsen. So it was like I was in, I was on some sort of journey. It was me and Ibsen and a few other people. And I was in this artistic What conversation with Ibsen across, you know, the the eras and you know he was and beyond the grave, you know, he and I were conversing, and I was hearing his voice. And there was something very important. To me at that time about that conversation that I was having artistically, right with Ibsen. And so I was, you know, working on this film, and we had just finished the film script, and I lost Lila, my daughter, and what happened in my work is all of a sudden I needed to keep working on that same world, and I had just had a reading of it at a retreat for a women’s theater company. I was producing the retreat, and I did a reading of it, of that film, and Kristen Martin from Hero Arts Center came up to me after that reading and said, Do you want to do this as a want to do this as a multi disciplinary theater show? If so, I’m on board. Let’s do it. And I thought, Well, okay, let’s just do it in another let’s tell the story over here. I’m flexible, and I was just embarking on that when I lost Lila, and all of a sudden, there was one thin, like I would say it was, so it was finer than a human hair, not really, but it seemed that way. It was like a dental Flo, thin thread of of grief and loss, the loss of a child that actually was part of the sort of subtext, or, you know, story of the main character of that original Ibsen play. And I hadn’t been paying any attention to it. I’ve been focusing on, like, the main themes in terms of how to like, it wasn’t even an adaptation what I was doing. It was kind of like, it’s an inspired by and making a new thing, right? And all of a sudden, that theme of the lost child, I couldn’t the whole project changed. So I was like working on the same project, but all of a sudden it was all about the kid and about grief. And I I believe that those, those deep connections to grief and loss were in the original Ibsen piece, but I hadn’t had the maturity or the life experience to understand them, and I’d been working in one way or another on this conversation with Ibsen for what, almost a decade at that point, and all of a sudden, the conversation deepened, and I made this piece sounding and it was very much About a mother’s grief and how it affects those around her in one crazy weekend on Cape Cod, where things get out of hand, like out of control, erotically, emotionally, physically. And I worked on that project for a long time, and that was the first wave of me through my work, really examining what grief truly is, and really confronting that there’s no space for it in American culture, and that there’s even less space for female grief, a woman’s grief, a mother’s grief, you might think not, but it’s true. Um, but, but just grief in general. And I know that culturally, a lot of us are more used to talking about grief and loss. You know, now that we’ve had a pandemic, um. But this was pre pandemic, and so it was. It became important to me as an artist, that what I learned through this conversation with Ibsen and by making this piece is that grief is a form of radical transformation. It’s generative. It is a creative force. It is intrinsically valuable to us as people, and when we deny it or try to overcome it, or see it as something, to get beyond, to be okay about, to let go of, to move beyond, heroically, we we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to create and acquiesce to the next stage in our transformation, because life is change. We’re always changing, and if we block that change energetically by not being available to accept grief and what it brings on a daily basis as part of the fabric of our lives. That brings us value, that introduces wonder and a new kind of a new way of seeing, even if it’s just temporarily a level of wonder, of not taking things for granted, is one wonderful, very valuable aspect to embracing grief. If we block that, we’re not giving ourselves the opportunity we need to become more of of who we are. So that was the beginning. And then the next phase was writing a book, my first book, which is in the process of I took a break from submitting during the pandemic with my agent. I just needed to do that because I was a mother during the pandemic and an artist, so So I wrote my first book, which was a literary non fiction book about serial grief and the value of a certain approach to grief. And the book was very, sort of experiential, very personal, but it was my first prose book. You mentioned, oh mother. It used to be called Marigold, but it’s called Oh Mother. Now,

 

Will Bachman  37:53

Oh Mother, tell us a bit more about your current venture. And I think you said it was riot, mom,

 

38:01

yeah,

 

Will Bachman  38:04

when might we see that coming out and tell us? How do all these elements work together? You said there’s a live, there’s online, there’s TV, there’s audio. This is something new to me. What this tell me about this kind of multi, multi platform, kind of creation,

 

Jennifer Gibbs  38:23

yeah, so um trying to, I’m not really meant to. I’m supposed to say just not too much about the story, right? So, okay,

 

Will Bachman  38:33

all right. So no, no, yeah, I

 

Jennifer Gibbs  38:35

won’t talk too much about the story. But umbrex. Umbrex is a, is a, is a world that was born of of an interest in where, where and how, where do women how do women create? Where are they creating from? And so it’s kind of set in this world, the current world, where two middle aged women who have were estranged bandmates from their riot girl days, which is the sort of feminist punk movement in the 90s come back together in a in a suburban context. One of them’s been a solo artist, and she’s just come out of rehab, and one of them became a mother and let go of music, and they come back together, and they reunite, and they they haven’t spoken for, you know, 20 something years, and there’s a lot of they were like sisters back in the day, and there’s a lot of tension and baggage and betrayal between them, and they end up inadvertently stumbling into making music together again, which. Swore they wouldn’t. And it’s it’s a feminist, punk inspired world

 

40:09

about

 

Jennifer Gibbs  40:12

making, making what you need to make, no matter what, on a do it yourself basis, and they end up the whole thing ends up snowballing, and they end up affecting people in ways they they don’t expect. So it’s, um, it’s meant to be a community building world, and the way that we are producing it, we decided we brought on a couple of women from my writers group who are also performers, who are perfect the roles, Daphne Rubin Vega, who is a wonderful singer and performer she originated, actually the the the young lead role in in rent, the Broadway musical Rent. And she’s a consummate, amazing theater performer, but she’s also, few people know, an incredible writer and musician, and she came of age in the, you know, low on the Lower East Side in the kind of punk feminist world. And so she’s very much kind of a riot girl herself. And then the other actress, who is one of our stars, is also from our writers group. Her name’s Florencia Lozano, and she is a brilliant writer and performer who’s been in and producer. Actually, she wrote and produced and starred in a film that won at the Austin Film Festival recently, and she’s just an amazing theater, film and television artist. And so these are two women who have been friends for a very long time, personally and professionally, and they are on board to star. And we went about this in a way. We decided not to pitch the project and make it commercial after we our first foray into pitching at a real network to pitching riot mom, I had a co creator whose name is also Jenny. Yeah. So, so the Jenny’s pitched to a couple of networks initially. This, this television show that we’d created called riot mom. And the feedback we got from the male executives was, this is so fantastic. You know, we love it. Here’s the thing, we already have a woman at a crossroads story. You know, we can’t take on another one right now. And Jenny and I looked at each other and we’re like, we get it woman at a crossroads. Okay, there’s one word for woman at a crossroads if you’re a writer and it’s protagonist, it’s person at a crossroads, that’s what a protagonist does. They make choices, they come to a crossroads, they have a challenge. They make a choice, right? We’re like, oh, we get it. You have a woman protagonist show already. We get one in your whole lineup, right? We get it now. And really it wasn’t that hard to get we knew what we were up against, and we said to ourselves, we don’t need to be anyone’s woman at a crossroads story. And we ended up deciding to do it independently the way we wanted to do it. And brought on Daphne and Flor, who were down for that. In fact, they suggested it after we asked them, Did they want to pitch it? So we we worked on figuring out how this story could be community based and and it’s very political story these women deal with. They get involved, very politically involved in resistance movements and so sort of like very sort of Pussy Riot inspired as well, right? And we decided that the the best way to do it would be to build it slowly and independently by starting with the least expensive means of production, and using those means of production to build community so that we could afford the most expensive which is the television, and that we would produce a pilot of it and release it all at once. And this is a way of storytelling that Jenny and I, and actually my husband, Luis Castro, who also was Harvard 92 have been discussing for a while. We have another project called train hoppers, which is also multi platform, and we’ve been trying to sort of describe it to people in the industry, and they kind of understood it, and kind of didn’t, because it’s not a spin off, it’s not a multiverse, it’s a single episode. Of a story, where if you want the whole story, you’re going to have to have it in your ear and on the screen and at a live pop up event that maybe you experience online or not, or maybe you go live. You can choose all three. You can choose one but the full story, the full episode, is multi. It’s distributed, released at once in a multi platform way. So in order to be nimble enough to do that, you kind of have to be independent. And we decided we would just go for it, and that’s what we’re doing. I don’t know if that’s clear enough.

 

Will Bachman  45:46

I just love that so much. I can’t wait to I can’t wait to see when it comes out. I want to turn back the clock. Tell me about any courses or professors or activities you were involved in at Harvard that continue to resonate with you?

 

Jennifer Gibbs  46:17

Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare, I um, and then her seminar on ghost writers. I was a renaissance person. I was interested in how the female body is staged culturally, where its agency lies culturally, what are the power structures and Dynamics IT subjects itself to and acts upon? And that was an extremely fruitful Shakespeare. And Marjorie Garber’s take on Shakespeare specifically, was a very fruitful place for me to explore those interests. Just as a side note, my master’s thesis title was something like chloroform and the little death, the maternal body on the dissection table and the delivery table in the Victorian theater of anatomy. So the invention of obstetrics. So I also was highly influenced by Adrian Kennedy, the playwright, Adrienne Kennedy’s playwright in class at Harvard, she became one of my closest friends and certainly a lifelong mentor when I moved to New York shortly after graduating Harvard, her words about my work and her understanding of my work gave me The courage to pursue a life as a writer. I felt a kinship in a way I could not explain, with her and her work. She took me under her wing. She made sure to recommend me, for example, for acting jobs in her plays. I I played Shelly winters in her play, a movie star has to star in black and white at the Public Theater when the signature theater company did a season of her work. Joseph Chaikin, the legendary downtown theater director, directed that, and it was a revival he had directed the original in the 60s. I believe it also at the public maybe anyway, so there you know that was, I had some astounding experiences via her mentorship and support and and many, many, many long conversations and coffees with her, and she taught me how to be a writer and a mother, um, so her playwrning course was very, very instrumental and um, and to this day, it also inspired me to start my own writer’s group in New York, which, you know, um. So that group, in one way, shape or form, has been going for almost a quarter century now, which is highly unusual. And we’re a group of multi disciplinary, interdisciplinary writer creators, with all women and and we’ve had great success, I would say, implementing the feedback principles that some of us experienced for the first time in Adrian’s playwriting course at Harvard. So in a way that the seed of, you know my writers group, I owe that to Adrian Kennedy, and that group has been a source of great ongoing support for myself and many other women who have been writing. Then, thirdly, and perhaps on a lighter note, of course, on 16th century British poetry, because I love verse, and anytime I feel like I’m bumping it up against, and we do in the world of television or film or even playwriting is sometimes especially playwriting, we bump up against feedback and development and the pressure to what to conform to Aristotelian standards, which are, you know, just Aristotelian structures, just one structure of many very viable narrative structures that have been used throughout millennia, you know. But when we feel that pressure to get ourselves in line with the Aristotelian, you know, arc, I like to think about 16th century poetry and its discipline and yet its madness. And I like to think of one phrase in particular that I remember from a poem that I really love, written by Sir Walter Raleigh, who, by the way, wasn’t really a poet, and that’s what I love about it, too, Sir Walter Raleigh. We know

 

Will Bachman  52:16

I hate to interrupt, but because I would love this conversation to keep going. I could. I have so many questions for you, actually, I have to wrap it up, because I know we’re at the top of the hour for our listeners. Where can they find you online? Where would we point them?

 

Jennifer Gibbs  52:34

You can, at this moment, go to LinkedIn, the real riot. Mom, okay, it’s the website for right mom, I suppose. But I’m gonna, I’m gonna close with that quote from Sir Walter Raleigh, nature, who, nature, who washed her hands in milk and hath forgot to dry them, is the first line. Nature washed her hands in milk, she just forgot to dry them. She’s sloppy and inconsiderate, and she’s a mess. And I just want to end with Mother Nature dripping milk dripping off her hands. So yeah, you know, I’m not on social media, but I will be back on soon. I only do it professionally, and you can find me on LinkedIn. This

 

Will Bachman  53:20

was such a rich conversation. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining today.

 

Jennifer Gibbs  53:24

Thank you. Bye.