Two Serious Ladies

Headnote

Playwrights JULIA JARCHO and SIBYL KEMPSON discuss writing under the spell of Jane Bowles

N A WARM SPRING EVENING IN NEW YORK CITY, a gaggle of people gathered at Bluestockings, a collectively owned Lower East Side volunteer bookshop with radical vibes, for a panel discussion called "Serious Ladies in Downtown Theater." Panelists included playwrights Julia Jarcho and Sibyl Kempson, director Alice Reagan and Dixon Place artistic director Ellie Covan. But the belle of the ball that evening was without doubt Jane Bowles, the midcentury American writer whose curious prose and cult status has been influencing writers over the years.

Most recently, Bowles, who died in 1973, has inspired plays by Jarcho {Nomads, which ran in June at the Incubator Arts Project in a production directed by Reagan) and Kempson {Fondly, Collette Richland, which the ensemble Elevator Repair Service will perform in New York City in the fall of 2015). This month Bowles's more familiar work/n the Summer House bows at the Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Provincetown, Mass., in a production directed by David Kaplan.

Bowles was not unknown during her brief lifetime. Truman Capote called her "a modern legend" and "one of the really original pure stylists," while Williams declared In the Summer House "a piece of dramatic literature that stands alone, without antecedents and without descendants, unless they spring from the one and only Jane Bowles." Her complete work, published under the title My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, is just shy of 500 pages and includes her novel Two Serious Ladies, In the Summer House (which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews, and revived in 1993 at Lincoln Center Theater in a critically acclaimed production directed by JoAnne Akalaitis) and several short stories and fragments. With her relatively small output, Bowles remains a "writer's writer." Throughout the evening at Bluestockings-which offered passionate discourses on why we read Bowles, why her brief and stormy life is fascinating, and what exacdy about her writing continues to inspire-people shared tales of their encounters with Bowles, usually prompted by introductions from other interesting writers.

"There is a reason that, in spite of her small oeuvre, generation after generation returns to her novel, her play and her stories,"...