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Who is Jen Silverman?

Excerpt from Alissa Watson’s MFA Directing Thesis Document October 3, 2025

“…funny, form-breaking, feminist…” 
– Diep Tran

In the time I have been studying at the º£½ÇÉçÇø (2023-2025), Jen Silverman has had two Broadway shows: The Roommate, starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, closed on December 15, 2024, and less than five months later, their adaptation of August Strindberg’s Creditors opened with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff, and Justice Smith. On top of that, their new novel, There’s Going to be Trouble, was released. Silverman’s essays are also regularly published in the New York Times, including my personal favourite, Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable, on April 28, 2024. I used this essay as an introduction to kick-start the rehearsal process of Witch by Jen Silverman, which I directed in the Bleviss Laboratory Theatre in the fall of 2024. With this essay from the playwright, I aimed to unite the team within the context of the story and inspire the actors not to shy away from the profound moral questions the play posed. This essay also made its way into the first day of rehearsals for The Moors. Silverman believes media – books, plays, films and TV shows – “can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain” (Silverman, “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable”). Silverman furthers with a manifesto of sorts, providing their artistic ethos:

"We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them. After all, our experience of living in communities with one another is often much more fluid and changeable than it is rigidly black and white. We have the audiences that we cultivate, and the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity. In our hair-trigger world of condemnation, division and isolation, art — not moralizing — has never been more crucial” (ibid).

The Moors premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in February 2016 and falls between Silverman’s The Roommate (2015) and Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (2016). Silverman’s aforementioned Witch premiered two years later. At times, there is an off-beat, bizarre situational comedy about Silverman’s work, which left me unsurprised to learn that in addition to Silverman’s BA in comparative literature from Brown University and their MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, they completed an Artist Diploma at Juilliard under Christopher Durang (Wikipedia Contributors). Durang is an American playwright “who showed us all how to dance on the funny/serious tightrope” (Lindsay-Abaire). People describe his work as being “joyfully unhinged and scary and ridiculously funny”; an apt influence on Silverman in their early journey (ibid).

During their BA, Silverman started taking playwriting classes, one of which was with playwright Paula Vogel, whose play, Indecent, opened the 2023-2024 º£½ÇÉçÇø Studio Theatre season, directed by Benjamin W. Smith. Silverman avidly read female writers, including Caryl Churchill, Naomi Iizuka, Naomi Wallace, and Sarah Kane, admittedly not involving themself with the male canon until later: “I didn’t read an Ibsen play until grad school” (Tran). Because Silverman’s early exposure to theatre was almost entirely female writers, they didn’t question whether there was a seat at the table for them. “In my mind, there was this table full of super-bold, outrageous, strong, political women. I looked at them and I was like, ‘Oh! Yes, please! Me too! I want to talk!’” (ibid).

Silverman was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, but, as a child of a physicist and a chemist, was raised all over the world, including France, Japan, Sweden, New Zealand, and even Canada. Silverman has long since returned to the United States but credits a childhood of global travel for forming their “interest in how individuals navigate societies and what happens when societal rules shift” (Mora). In Silverman’s plays, “these explorations often take on a darkly comedic approach” (ibid).

Works cited.

Lindsay-Abaire, David. “Chris Durang Was My Willy Wonka.” AMERICAN THEATRE, 15 Apr. 2024, . Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

Mora, Esaú. “Very Theatre, Very Camp: An Interview with Jen Silverman.” Basement Theatre, .

Silverman, Jen. “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable.” The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2024, . Accessed 28 Apr 2024.

Tran, Diep. “The Many Lives of Jen Silverman.” AMERICAN THEATRE, 8 Sept. 2016, .

Wikipedia Contributors. “Jen Silverman.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 May 2025. 

Source:

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GOTHIC LITERATURE AND ITS CONNECTION TO THE MOORS

Excerpt from Alissa Watson’s MFA Directing Thesis Document October 3, 2025

Blending elements of horror, romance, and mystery, gothic fiction first emerged in the late 18th century. At the heart of this genre is the question of power. “On the one hand it tends to be drawn to very powerful, often supernaturally powerful, or obscenely powerful figures and on the other, to people who are completely vulnerable” (The British Library 3:30). In The Moors, regardless of their societal rank, each character is desperate for power. Like gothic fiction, Silverman “explores the limits of what it is to be human – to be driven by either internal desires or forces outside yourself that make you, or compel you, to do things you don’t want to do” (3:48). Below I discuss some of the characteristics of gothic literature and how they are used in the play or heightened in our production of The Moors.

A Castle or a Great Mansion

• The phrase gothic literature comes from gothic architecture and utilizes a setting that is foreboding and brooding. Features like light, dark and shadow are prevalent which casts the perfect backdrop for a story with troubling themes. For example, the stately home in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or the Transylvania castle in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
• “Gothic fiction is fascinated by strange places. On the one hand very wild and remote landscapes and on the other, to very imprisoning places” (The British Library 1:52).

The Great Mansion in The Moors: With the opening stage directions we are dropped into the “parlor of an elegant, ancient mansion on the English moors” (Silverman 7). Emilie is lured to an ancestral home on the moors, where time stands still. This is a move from Emilie’s more modern world outside London to imprisonment in a distant sense of time.

• Gothic fiction wants to see “the relationship between the modern world and the past – not as one of evolution or development – but of sudden juxtaposition and often violent conflict, in which the past erupts within the present and deranges it” (The British Library 2:48). This directly relates to Silverman’s note against using British accents in the production, “[p]lay the anachronisms. This play is about the present” (Silverman 5). The play is about the present but set inside a genre container from the past. The conversation about how to use anachronisms was prevalent in design meetings and influences as well as acting style.

The Supernatural

• Presented as an uneasy paranormal element or an ancient prophecy that lurks in the background.
  • Hound of Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) – devil, demon, but has a rational explanation in the end
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
  • The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe)

The Supernatural in The Moors: This was the element I was most excited about weaving into the production through the voicing of stage directions. The choice to record some of the stage directions in the play manifested the narration of our 7th character, Branwell. The choice to include the voice of Branwell emulates one of the most powerful motifs in gothic fiction, the ghost. “The thing that you think is dead but comes back vividly alive in the present” (The British Library 3:05).

• I also considered whether prophecy was at play in The Moors – one that demands the destruction of the entire family if one tries to disrupt the natural order of things.
• The supernatural also greatly influenced the quality of the set. To play into the mystery, it felt necessary to have many entrances and exits that are illogical or can’t be explained. Emilie’s descent of the grand staircase feels like a visual representation of a descent into madness. This also speaks to the gothic motif of confinement or an inability to escape the inevitable.
• Two types of supernatural arose in gothic fiction “one that uses the supernatural as it were, and expects us to believe in it, and the other that gives a natural or realistic explanation of it” (The British Library 8:15). In the novels of Ann Radcliffe for example, there is no supernatural; ghosts appear but they are eventually explained in a naturalistic way. The necessity for the aliveness of the space in Robert Shannon’s set design is a nod to the supernatural in a naturalistic way. The moors as a landscape becomes responsible for the destruction of some of our characters.

The Uncanny in The Moors: “One really useful term for thinking about gothic writing, is the uncanny [. . .] something that’s new, but also takes us back to something, either in our own psychological past, or something in the world that’s archaic” (The British Library 5:26). For example, we “suddenly recognize somebody who seems unfamiliar and strange [. . .] figures that are not quite human, that look human, but are not entirely human, like dolls, wax works, automata (5:57). The Moors wouldn’t be complete without the Mastiff and the Moor-Hen, animal characters played by human actors. When we started rehearsals, our goal was to use animal behaviour as a springboard for building the physicality of these characters. The uncanny is about doubles or two worlds, which makes me wonder who the true beasts in this play are.

What other features of gothic literature do you recognise?

Works cited.

Silverman, Jen. The Moors. Samuel French, 2017.

Tristan and the Classics. “8 Aspects of GOTHIC LITERATURE.” YouTube, 19 June 2021, . Accessed 29 July 2025.

The British Library. “The Gothic.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 6 June 2014, . Accessed 16 July 2025. 

Photo: iStock

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Director's Note | Alissa Watson

TIME
1840s…ish

SETTING
The bleak moors…of England? Think Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and the Brontë sisters.

From there, Silverman is deliberately spare on the page, a gift to future collaborators. “There’s a lot of mystery for me around the world of the moors, and much of what I tried not to do on the page was solve the mystery [. . .] the thing that felt important to me was that the moors had to feel both beautiful and dangerous. And from the convergence of beauty and danger, we get the mystery.” With this freedom, the landscape of the production you are about to see was expertly crafted by the talents of our unique team; The Moors is its own universe, built on land that holds more power than those who attempt to usurp their own.

One of my great discoveries in my time at the º£½ÇÉçÇø was how much I adore non-literal storytelling. In approaching this script, I knew it was imperative to have a team of collaborators that could think outside the box, share my affinity for absurdism and dark humour, and above all else, tolerate clown in the rehearsal hall. Silverman asks collaborators to play the anachronisms – a thing belonging to a period other than that in which it exists. For example, the play may be set on the bleak moors of England, but Silverman insists all characters use their local accents in performance. I have found that fully embracing the blending of old and new worlds, is the key to unlocking Silverman’s work. In our production, the anachronisms work in different ways depending on the design element, which is why you may recognize spaghetti western and bossa nova in Matt Skopyk’s musical compositions, or Dark Shadows in T. Erin Gruber’s lighting and video design, or Robert Shannon’s landscape that resists human dominance juxtaposed against 1830s fashion silhouettes. The marriage of these design elements created a malicious playground grand enough to sustain the heightened theatricality of these characters and their pursuit of their own obsessions.

After reading Jen Silverman’s The Moors for the first time, I felt like I had never read anything like it, and I hope your viewing experience contains that same thrill. We have conjured a work that may haunt you for some time to come, I know it will me. Thank you for traversing The Moors, in Studio Theatre.

Written by Alissa Watson | Photo supplied

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