The HeteroMonotony Project
Learning about marriage through a play about divorce.
Perhaps I should have expected the imposter syndrome when I decided to make a show about marriage. Perhaps I should have expected the raised brows. The follow up question, have YOU ever been married? and how it would make me feel to answer, No. How I didn’t want to admit that it made me feel.
My own mother, a stalwart supporter of my work, quipped when I told her I was working on a play about women’s desire and dissatisfaction within marriage, ‘Oh yeah, and what would you know about it?’
She didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.
Let me back up a moment and explain. I have spent the last several years making devised theatre – usually participatory or immersive, usually at some intersection of pleasure, sexuality or reproductive justice themes. Devised theatre can look a lot of different ways, but generally refers to a piece of theatre that is built from the ground up by a collective of artists, rather than actors stepping into a finalized, pre-existing script. The last show I co-created was an exploration of how the Covid-19 was impacting our relationship to sex and intimacy, made up of the actors’ personal stories and reflections, interspersed with bits of choreography and audience interaction. Prior to that, I mostly built shows with a rad reproductive justice theatre collective based in Chicago. We made plays about youth abortion access, virginity myths, racial justice as reproductive justice. I love making work that engages audiences directly in topics like this.
When I was getting my master’s in performance studies, I was choking on theory and academic jargon, desperate for some kind of applied practice. It was my saving grace that I discovered the Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL), a project housed in NYU Steindhardt’s Program in Educational Theatre. VPL uses interview transcripts or other media artifacts as the raw for verbatim, documentary theatre investigations. I performed in a piece about political polarization in the U.S. during my grad program and it saved my mental and creative health.
It was because of this that, a year or so later, with my freshly minted MA, I was on a date at a stranger’s party (pitched to me by said date with the lure of “it’ll be full of theatre people!”) I bonded with Jenn. Jenn had also worked with verbatim theatre and been mentored by VPL’s founder, Joe. We hadn’t overlapped during our time at NYU, but it was delicious to bond over our shared love of interview-based theatre, explorations of sexuality and feminism. Jenn had a dual background as a theatre artist and birth doula, and I had my own as a theatre artist and sex educator, so the fit felt natural. Beyond that, Jenn has an infectious enthusiasm, a brightness and vivacity that immediately announces that she is a woman who gets shit done. I adore this quality in people. Especially women.
It was one of those beautiful adult friend-finder moments that resulted in an equally beautiful creative collaborator-ship, beginning when we met for coffee after said party and discussed our shared interests:
Jenn wanted to make a play about sexlessness in marriages. I wanted to make a play about whether marriage was even salvageable as an institution. Jenn wanted to make a play about why we normalize shitty marriage with pithy memes and jokes. We had both just read Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, and were fired the fuck up about how we might maneuver our way out of a heterosexuality predicated on mutual mistrust, animosity and a kind of patronizing tolerance. Why do we put up with these kinds of shitty relationship norms? Complaining about them but never actually holding them to account? Why do we go so far as to even romanticize them into some cute quirk or side effect of romantic partnership with the opposite sex? To uphold what? Some kind of happily ever after narrative that we were sold as kids?
This was the crucible within which, The HeteroMonotony Project was born. What started as a cheeky nickname, became the title of a raw, vulnerable exploration of love, marriage and divorce, through the lens of divorcées. Over the course of the past year, Jenn and I have conducted interviews with over twenty women who have gone through, or are currently going through, divorces from heteromonogamous (or heteromonogamous presenting) marriages. These interviews are the formation of the play that we were lucky enough to receive an EAG Grant to produce.
Perhaps this is the moment to pull over and tell you that as a child, I was obsessed with getting married. I went through a particular period around sixth grade that this obsession apexed; a friend and I had a playdate to plan our weddings. We cut out pictures from bridal magazines and outlined our wedding plans. Place settings, venues, flowers. We drew bespoke dresses. We watched Father of the Bride. Her mother even brought home a taster sampler of cake options so that we could pretend we were tasting our wedding cake. Movie viewing aside, (Steve Martin, Martin Short and Diane Keaton still slap in that movie) a huge part of me now screams, What the fuck were the adults in the room thinking letting us do that shit?? Did no one have a feminist consciousness to speak of?? They just let us run rampant with patriarchy’s prime directive and sit there like the future Stepford wives of America, planning our weddings at age 12 to invisible grooms (who cares who they were, as long as they chose us, right?) as if there were nothing bigger to look forward to than that “one special day”? But my parents weren’t really in the habit of censoring the musings of my young imagination, so I suppose that wouldn’t have been very Montessori of them. And, to their credit, they did plenty of media literacy and critical conversations throughout the years that brought me to my own feminist consciousness. And so, the memory of that experience sits there, an uncomfortable, bruising reminder of how seductive the promise of marriage is for a human heart that yearns to be cherished. No wonder Disney got its hooks into so many of us.
It wasn’t until college that I decided that I never wanted to get married. (Though I very much still wanted to be asked, brat that I am.) I resented the bill of goods that I felt that I’d been sold – the narrative that told me I was only as valuable as the man who chose me. I told my college boyfriend that I never wanted to legally get married, even if we lived together forever (which I hoped we would), even if we had children (which seemed like a given). I just wanted to know he loved me. That every day he chose me and me above all else, the way that we would say in wedding vows, if we were to have them. A wedding that would be ritual only, no legality, because I could not stand the thought of biting at the governmental bribe for status and tax breaks that I knew to be marriage.
We broke up before marriage was ever deeply, really on the table. But I still feel like he was the closest I ever came to marriage, really. The longest of my three deep love-relationships. The one that brought me the closest to the kind of traditional markers of intimacy that my extended family could all recognize and get behind. Plus he just really loved me very well. My great uncle likes to tell me that “he would have married you.” whenever I go for a visit, over a decade later. “Probably.” I say, “But I didn’t want that.”
So. I went into making this theatre project convinced that I would simply be confirming my own abolitionist leanings about marriage. It’s an institution built on patriarchy and property ownership. One that has historically been used to control women, segregate races, exclude minorities and LGBTQ+ folks, and consolidate wealth and status. And I have nothing more to say about it.
I did not expect this process to dredge up the absolute deepest corners of my childhood yearning for it; to lay them bare under the microscope of age and feminist consciousness. But it has. Every time I field the question “Have you ever been married?” from an interview subject or perspective audience member (a very valid one, given my role as co-creator of a play about divorce). Every time a well-intentioned friend follows up with the caveat that, “but of course you could have gotten married, if you’d wanted to” As if we both know that it’s still a target, somehow, somewhere that matters. As if rejecting marriage were powerful, but never having been invited into it humiliating. Could I have? Maybe. Maybe not.
I did not expect to confront the icky contradiction it in the fact that I reject making marriage goal for myself but balked at the idea that my boyfriend (the polyamorous one) would marry his other partner. How pitiful, how pathetic would that make me suddenly, if he had a wife who wasn’t me. It really all is about chooseability and acceptance isn’t it?
And I did not expect to be both comforted and humbled by the fact that this imposter syndrome, this sticky web of contradictory yearnings around marriage doesn’t make me unique. Even a uniquely bad feminist. In all of the interviews that I did there seemed to be this tension. I want it, but did it hurt me? I want it, but does that betray my values? I don’t want it, does that make me bad? I never wanted it, so why did I go there?
One of our respondents described a trauma-healing visualization she did once:
“I saw this little girl in me, dressed like a Disney princess. And she's waiting on a bench. And she's waiting for the prince, and she's been waiting forever, like, she's like he's- he'll be here soon. She's just very…not aware that it's been 45 years, um, and no perfect prince has come by. And I'm stuck between this Instagram world where it's like, “Ladies, you are a queen, and you just gotta put on your queen vibe and stop tolerating the nonsense, and you'll find your king, because I found my king.” And I'm like, what percentage of people are actually making that up? These people are invested in their success, right? So. Am I really, like, am I just being pessimistic? Or am I not buying the hype? And I get stuck. And I go back and forth and back and forth. All day. All day.”
I wish I could tell you that I have some kind of revelatory, neat-as-a-bow, answer for what making this play has taught me about marriage or divorce. Even what it’s taught me about my own feelings about those things. Perhaps I’m just not there yet. Perhaps, given the time to really marinate within the voices of these brave, beautiful women that I got to interview, I will emerge with some clearer version of my own opinion on the matter. Or perhaps I will simply sit in awe of the sheer magnitude that is a human heart.
I recently wrote in a letter to my future goddaughters, “to love something that is a bit broken is such a valiantly human thing.” This, is, perhaps, how I feel about marriage and divorce.
Stories of choosing another and choosing oneself. Of wanting so tenderly to be chosen, and learning so painfully what that can cost. Of choosing to venture out, again, and let the soft underbelly of your heart be stroked by another, even when you aren’t sure if they can give you want you truly need or even want, most of the time.
To be disappointed and still want. God, what magnificence.
These are some of the tones and textures of the stories I’ve been sitting with as we hurtle towards showtime at the end of the month. And so I’m trying to just let them live for now and gain as much sensation from them as I can. Perhaps I’ll have more to say on the matter once we’ve wrapped. Or perhaps it will take many months before I can really digest much more than that, but I can say that it’s something that both intrigues and frightens me for what it brings up internally. And that feels important to at least pay attention to.
If you want to take a taste of what I’m talking about, and I hope you do, why don’t you come and see the show, if you’re around the New York area? It’s humbling and heartening and all kinds of human to take in the stories of these women and let them move through you. I think we’ve done a good job of honoring them.
The HeteroMonotony Project plays at The Episcopal Actor’s Guild in Manhattan, August 22nd-24th, 2025, and there are still tickets. I’d love to see you there.
Xo
Jessamyn