For a writer whose work is increasingly hard to miss, Jen Silverman is remarkably intrigued by the idea of invisibility.
“I’m really interested in the people that nobody looks at and all of the ways in which people operate underneath the gaze, underneath the radar,” says Silverman, who explores that theme in two plays receiving notable stagings in upcoming weeks.
In D.C., “The Moors,” a dark comedy, is arriving in a commedia dell’arte-flavored staging from Faction of Fools Theatre Company this month. On Broadway, the suspenseful two-hander “The Roommate” starts performances next month, starring Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone.
Both plays examine the disappearing act that society can force on less-powerful people, including older women. And both portray those all-but-sidelined individuals cannily subverting that erasure.
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“That kind of invisibility — there’s a way that we internalize it, right?” says Silverman. “And it does something to us to think of ourselves as invisible as well. But then there’s also a power inside it. What can you do when no one is looking?”
People not looking is not one of Silverman’s problems these days. The streaming platform Max recently wrapped up the second season of the crime-and-journalism drama “Tokyo Vice,” for which Silverman was writer-producer. In April, Random House published Silverman’s novel about political activism “There’s Going to Be Trouble.” Their plays are widely produced. In 2022, Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) headlined the Silverman-scripted narrative podcast “The Miranda Obsession.” It’s an in-the-zeitgeist moment for a writer whose vision, versatility and flair for bold choices have made their work essential throughout the arts and entertainment world.
Silverman’s writing features a bracing “combination of wit and muscle,” says “Tokyo Vice” showrunner J.T. Rogers. Rogers sees in Silverman’s work “this incredible intelligence, and the sense that I’m being told a story I haven’t heard before — which is so refreshing and rare.”
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Silverman tells those stories in remarkably varied ways. “The Roommate,” about older women with drastically different life experiences who find themselves sharing a house, is relatively naturalistic. Jack O’Brien, who is directing the Broadway production, said in an email forwarded by a publicist for the show that Farrow and LuPone have responded “almost chemically to the rhythms and the nuances so immediately recognizable and comfortable to them.”
By contrast, Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties; In Essence, a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous Exploration; Do You Remember When You Were in Middle School and You Read About Shackleton and How He Explored the Antarctic?; Imagine the Antarctic as a P---- and It’s Sort of Like That” is an absurdist comedy with a metatheatrical twist. Premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 2016 (under a variant title), the provocative piece explodes clichés and expectations around gender and sexuality.
Now based in New York, Silverman gained perspective on behavior and culture at a young age, thanks to growing up largely abroad, in Japan, France, Finland and other countries where their physicist father was working. “I was constantly being an observer outside of the community,” they recall.
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Back Stateside, at high school in Connecticut, they marveled at “the intricacies of a culture that I had not been raised inside of. The slang. The cultural references.” Even today (they decline to give their age), “I definitely feel like an alien all the time, no matter where I am.”
A comparable alienation initially haunts the governess who arrives at an isolated mansion in the Brontë-spoofing “The Moors.” The mansion’s inhabitants — including two “spinster” sisters (as the cast list calls them), a maid, and a mastiff who falls in love with a moorhen — go on to reveal startling vulnerabilities and execute shocking power plays.
“So many of Jen’s plays are about power, and negotiating power, and the ways in which class and gender and sexuality influence all of those,” says Silverman’s frequent collaborator Mike Donahue, who directed the play’s 2017 New York premiere.
An avid reader, Silverman wrote the play fast after being immersed in Charlotte Brontë’s letters. “The way in which Charlotte was talking about isolation and intimacy — and the geography of the place, how it was essentially a character — all of that started infiltrating my mind,” they say.
“The Moors” intrigued Faction of Fools co-artistic director Francesca Chilcote, who was looking for a script that would harmonize with commedia, the centuries-old street-theater form that the company specializes in. The troupe has typically mounted original works or commedia interpretations of classics. Tackling a popular contemporary script is a different challenge. But the play’s humor and skewering of patriarchal assumptions seemed to director Chilcote a good match for commedia’s irrepressible clowns and irreverence toward social hierarchy. (High-status greedy old men and pedantic scholars are regular commedia targets.)
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This iteration of “The Moors” will feature masks, a commedia tradition, as well as lazzi (bits of comic business) that give a commedia spin to the play’s jokes and situations. “We’re not trying to change ‘The Moors’ and make it into a commedia play,” Chilcote says. “We’re trying to bring commedia to ‘The Moors.’”
The idiosyncratic approach does not alarm Silverman. When writing a play, they say, they try to leave creative space for future interpreters.
“I generally think of plays as an invitation,” Silverman says. “They’re an invitation to the audience. But they’re also an invitation to the other collaborators who will someday work on the play.”
If you go
The Moors
Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 Seventh St. SE. factionoffools.org.
Dates: July 18-Aug. 10.
Prices: $15-$35.
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