‘Mary Jane’ Director Anne Kauffman Talks Darkness And Light In Life And Art

In this particular instance, Amy Herzog and I worked together on a play called Belleville a few years ago. I establish relationships with playwrights, so pretty much if someone like Amy Herzog—and Amy Herzog in particular, I would say—comes to me with a play, I’m pretty predisposed to say yes. She’s such an extraordinary writer and just an extraordinary human being. She’s a very sly writer, because it seems as though she’s a mainstream writer, but in fact she’s quite experimental. This play is extraordinary on so many levels: she’s playing with so many different levels of genre and consciousness and pursuit and text. She’s an astonishing thinker and writer. Honestly, I had no idea—I was like, “Okay, Amy, sure, let’s do this play, this is a difficult play, it’s a difficult emotional play.” And even I who know Amy very well can take her work at face value, when in fact it has nothing to do with face value. It all lives underneath. So I didn’t really know what I was in for. When we did this at Yale, we did the production that I thought was there, and we did it well. Revisiting it—it’s extraordinary when you know you’ll have another chance; to have that second chance, which we got with Belleville too—it flowered in a completely different way. My interaction with it and its profound effect on me—it opened up even more. You know, the high holidays were this past week, and I haven’t been to synagogue, it’s got to be 10 years. And this year, after working on Amy’s play and talking to a very particular rabbi about the Hasidic woman in the play, I was like, “I need to go to synagogue!” [Laughs] Because the play is actually in such complex pursuit of spirituality and what it is to become—who you were, who you are now, and what it is to become in your next iteration—it made me go to temple!

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