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The Sacramento Bee, Calif., Marcus Crowder column: Isolation, robotJan 15, 2010 (The Sacramento Bee - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Have you heard the one about a young, adopted Chinese woman who builds a lifelike robot to find her birth mother? If you attend the new B Street Theatre production of "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow," which opens this weekend, you will. Playwright Rolin Jones' 2006 Pulitzer Prize-nominated work has both playful spirit and a deeper, brooding core. Not surprisingly, Jones seems like that himself while talking on the phone from Los Angeles, where he's working as part of the writing staff of the television show "Friday Night Lights." "I wanted to do something that moved -- that had some velocity to it," Jones says. "The plays I had written up to that point were Chekhov light -- Chekhov without the old people. They were incredibly precious and boring." Playwright Lynne Nottage, one of his teachers at the Yale School of Drama, suggested he be more honest in his work. So instead of trying to be a serious artistic playwright, Jones wrote something he wanted to see himself. As Jones discusses the "genesis" of "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow," he's likely aware of his ironic word choice. Intelligent design is a widely disputed theory, which, roughly summarized, asserts that the universe and its living things resulted from an intelligent cause or agent, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Advocates of ID (as it's called) believe the designer to be the Christian God. The theory challenges the idea of evolution. The play features a humanlike robot named Jenny Chow, created by the young technological genius Jennifer Marcus. Which would make Jennifer Marcus equal to God in the ID theory of creation. Only Jennifer Marcus has obsessive-compulsive disorder and can't leave her home in Calabasas. That's why she's built Jenny Chow. Jones culled an episode from his own life for the main element of the plot. He had been working as a pizza delivery guy "a little bit longer than I should have." One night he delivered a pizza to the home of a girl who had been the mascot at his high school. "We both looked into each other's eyes and said 'God, we're not doing what we should be doing, are we?' " The girl had OCD, and Jones spent the summer hanging out with her. "There was the whole thing about getting her out of the house, which took a lot longer than it should have. Then getting her into the car, making sure the mats in the car were in the right place before we could take off." That episode always stuck with Jones, as did something else he learned in another pre-writing career job. He was the executive assistant to a high-powered woman executive. "One of my jobs was to make sure she got home from the bars at night," Jones says. She once told him she had gone to China to adopt a baby and Jones remembered that, as well. Finally while Jones was in graduate school at the Yale School of Drama, he was told to write for actors who were there. "We had these two kick-ass Asian actresses -- so this whole thing just smashed together. It wasn't just one thing, but a combination of them all colliding," Jones says. Los Angeles-based director Marianne Savell, who's heading the B Street production, was already a fan of Jones through "Friday Night Lights." She liked the humor of "Jenny Chow," but even more, she appreciates its depth. "It's about the breakdown of the family and the breakdown of society," Savell says. "How people would rather e-mail you and text you than actually speak to you or see you." "Ultimately, what I loved about the play, as edgy as it is -- what I mean by that is it's got a lot of language -- the play is absolutely full of heart," Savell says. Sylvia Kwan, who plays the housebound inventor Jennifer Marcus, had read the play a few years ago as a B Street intern before she was cast from Los Angeles, where she lives now. She thinks the play revolves around its intimate relationships. "It's about gambling," Kwan says. "What is most important in your life and what you would give up everything for to pursue, to find or to get? What is essential?" To see more of The Sacramento Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sacbee.com/. Copyright (c) 2010, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |