A Life

I met Morgan Jenness in the late 1980’s, early 90’s. Before I was writing plays.

She came to see me do my performance art in a loft on skid row in downtown L.A. and we began one of the most life changing relationships I have ever had.

She told me I should write plays and then she brought Maria Irene Fornes into my life. They became surrogate maternal figures.

They rewired my brain and ushered me into an art life and career I had no idea I could have. She calmed the storm in me, taking away the sabotage, and giving me direction. There was crazy involved, on both ends, but I believed everything she said. She was as vulnerable as I was in letting me into her life & process.

Art was just one part of the larger encompassing journey that Morgan encouraged, because although she dramaturged everything I wrote, she also changed me as a human being.

She was clear that I could not make the kind of art I wanted to make, long forever-life art, bigger-idea art, if I couldn’t make a life work as well.

We talked about plays, but we also talked about how one can live so that the play can become. How do we manifest these pieces into the world? Art, politics, love, community. The dismissals, the rejections, none of them mattered, everything was purposely there to learn from. She kept my mind filled & she demanded a lot from me.

Five-hour coffee dates in the Village or in L.A. or up on the lawn in Santa Barbara or Cal-Arts.

She was presence for me.

I can see us walking even now, wrestling with the ideas. I remember once bursting into tears while describing how hard it was to write a very hard play . She said, ‘Oh, that’s good, that’s really good.”

She became my agent at the Helen Merrill Agency, when even Helen Merrill, cigarette dangling from mouth, didn’t think I could make them money. I followed her to Abrams until she left the agent world.

Morgan worked, among many places, at The Public Theatre under Joe Papp and George Wolfe, I remember going to visit her, Shelby Jiggetts, and Shirley Fishman in the infamous literary office. Magical visits.

When I was inaugurated into New Dramatists, she sat next to me and held my hand. When Jo Bonney included me in her anthology of solo performance history, Morgan wrote my introduction. When I won the MacArthur, she was the first person I called, and she said, “I’m not surprised at all.” When my father died, she had a sixth sense and called, “This is also a place of learning, of becoming.”

I often drove her insane and grew into myself as an artist because of her. I took great risk at her urging and affirmation, because she held out a net that I realize now she was not always holding, but that’s okay, she made me believe.

It’s true that she and Irene inspired something so powerful in me that I wrote beyond my abilities and discovered great truths.

I teach now because of Morgan and Irene. I am in essence channeling both of them into the room. Sometimes, I even ritualize the appearance & leave a chair for Morgan & Irene.

One year, early on in my career, when I was doing a million things at once, and thinking I could, I called to check in with Morgan. She was so irritated with me that I was reluctant to tell her what I was doing, but I did. I hear a scream over the phone, “ARE YOU CRAZY!” Then I hear silence, then a sigh, then she says, “Okay, call me on Monday and tell me how it went…”

She helped me clear the madness by showing me how to find comfort and answer in writing. She was a friend, a mentor, then family.

She is everything. A life.

Rest in peace, Morgan Jenness.
I will miss you the rest of my days.