Crossover Jordan

BOOK IT Lindsey Nance and Steven Camara crack one open in Circle Theatre’s Boy.

You could almost call it the Sarah Ruhl Rule. Looking at the seasons at some of the city’s top theaters, you start to see a pattern. At the Goodman, this season and last, the only non-Chicago woman represented on the main stage was Ruhl. At Steppenwolf this season, the only female playwright is…Ruhl. Meanwhile, of the 14 plays this season on the main stages of Writers Theatre, Victory Gardens and Northlight Theatre, only one—Northlight’s upcoming Gee’s Bend—is penned by a woman.

Sure, the Goodman has local Ifa Bayeza, and Steppenwolf commissions work from Chicago’s Marisa Wegrzyn; we’re glad to see our own female playwrights getting work. But with the rest of the mainstage seasons packed with nonlocal guys like Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh and Horton Foote, and an unofficial one-woman quota, you might start to wonder: There are other women writing plays out there, right?

There are, of course, but with Ruhl ruling the regional-theater circuit, we have to look to smaller companies to find them. Tiny storefronts like Collision Theatre Company, Dog & Pony and the now-defunct Uma Productions have been the only ones so far to produce the works of rising playwrights like Sheila Callaghan and Rinne Groff in Chicago. Prolific male writers like Neil LaBute and Adam Rapp, meanwhile, have had nearly every one of their plays produced here.“There’s a study that came out about six years ago now that has all the statistics; it was pretty alarming,” says New York–based playwright Julia Jordan. “Only something like 18 percent of new plays produced in this country are written by women. [The 2002 study, prepared for the New York State Council on the Arts, actually showed that 17 percent of the plays produced by off-Broadway and regional theaters that year were by women.] That’s pretty shocking, especially when places like Juilliard are going begging, trying to find male writers, because they’re all going to Hollywood.”

Jordan’s play Boy opens in a production at Circle Theatre this week; it’s only the second time she’s been produced in Chicago (American Theater Company staged her St. Scarlet in 2006). “There are so many female writers out there, and they’re just not getting done,” says the writer, who is a Juilliard grad herself. “And when they do get done, it’s generally in smaller houses and on second stages.”

Circle is one of those smaller houses. The Forest Park–based company is known for, among other things, being the theater where Rebecca Gilman got her start, with a 1996 production of The Glory of Living. “One thing that Circle prides itself on is trying to be the one to show you that playwright you haven’t seen yet, or that you haven’t seen enough of yet,” says Circle artistic director Kevin Bellie. “It’s pretty clear to us that Julia Jordan is right on the cusp of being a huge thing, just as Rebecca Gilman was, or as Sarah Ruhl was a couple of years ago.”

Jordan, a Minnesota native, began her career in acting school. “I never acted professionally,” she says. “I was really bad at acting.” But it was through an acting-school monologue exercise that she got her writing start. “People were supposed to write something autobiographical, and I just didn’t want to do it. So I made something up and pretended it was true.”

Before long, several of her friends were using her made-up something for auditions, and then asking for monologues of their own. “Then this very small theater in the Bronx took those monologues and put them into an evening,” Jordan recalls. “I didn’t even go to the rehearsal for that, but I showed up to see it. It was on Arthur Avenue, which is a very Italian section. The woman sitting next to me was an elderly Italian lady, and she didn’t know that I had written it. But she was just very effusive, grabbing my hand and laughing and crying and talking back to the play, and I was just very taken with that. I wanted more of it, so I started writing.”

“Once I got into Juilliard it was like, Oh, I’m good,” she says. “I wasn’t a good actress, but people seem to think I’m good at this.”It’s taken Jordan longer to get noticed than it has her classmates like David Auburn (Proof) and Stephen Belber (Tape), but she thinks theater’s gender bias is improving. “Sarah and, say, Lynn Nottage are the stars, and they get done consistently, but I look at my girlfriends and we all have careers,” she says. “We mostly have to do TV work on the side, but that’s true for everyone.”

Bellie feels confident that Boy will finally establish Jordan as a star in Chicago’s eyes. “We were stunned that it hadn’t been done here yet,” he says.

Boy gets its Chicago premiere Wednesday 23.