At the beginning there is one chair in Jane’s room.

Then no chairs. They sit on the desk or the bed or the floor. They stand.

The bed frame leaves, but the mattress remains, and it’s as good a place to sit as any.

And we don’t really pay so much attention to the way the room isn’t Jane’s anymore because we’re so busy laughing.

At one point there are seven stools that are very conspicuously not chairs.

Then those are gone too and actually the mattress is gone too and actually there’s nowhere to sit.

There is nowhere to rest.

But it’s okay because we’re still laughing, we are all still laughing.

And everything happens on top of everything else and what was once a bedroom feels like Grand Central Station and what was once an idea is just a bunch of QR codes and chaos reigns and we’re laughing so much at so many things we can’t catch our breath enough to decide what matters most.

And then

Gratefully

The play invites us to breathe.

I set out above to describe the play Not Not Jane’s by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, currently playing as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, and I think instead I described the relentlessness of life. How it changes around you to become less and less yours, but never not yours because of course you’re never not there, you didn’t not make the choices. And isn’t life just as completely absurd as business taking over your bedroom? Delivery workers really do peek all the way into our homes. We really do worship at the altar of brand logos. Fart jokes really are always funny (and I feel confident saying that every member of the team behind this production is ready to die on that hill).

The story of this play, the cause-and-effect plot of it, happens in the set. It changes progressively through wonderfully efficient transitions that take this young woman’s bedroom further and further from hers to the point of becoming unrecognizable, no longer hers but also not not hers. The promise of the title, fulfilled in this very simple throughline expressed through a scenic narrative arc, becomes a vehicle for so much else in our absurdly corporate lives:

The grant that is responsible for Jane’s room transformation could have gone instead to someone making “pornos without sex” because at the end of the day it’s a fund intended to make up for a CEO’s corporate guilt with some philanthropy and the CEO isn’t really paying attention to it.

His grants officer who has not yet been given the title of Grants Officer missed an appointment to remove her infected gall bladder to focus on getting noticed at her job.

“It’s been extremely convenient to date you,” Jane says to her boyfriend who she met on an app that matches people based on living nearby and watching the same shows.

Her contractor–who is also her food delivery driver–secures an audition for what might finally be his DREAM ROLE, but first he has to finish rebuilding her room based on floor plans that he totally understands and is not confused by at all.

Jane’s ever-interrupting mother seems like she can’t respect a work space until you realize that this room is inside HER house.

“It’s bad, but we’re good,” Jane and Theresa say to each other about the room that wanted to be a community space that might now be a marketplace being sponsored by maybe some bad people… And don’t we all say that to each other and to ourselves? Don’t we need to believe that in order to cope with reality and keep on living, safe in the knowledge that at least it’s not our fault, at least we ourselves are good?

Tricia Hersey, founder and leader of the Nap Ministry, writes that Rest is Resistance. In the face of the relentless capitalist grind, we have to fight for rest and when we demand it, we are fighting back. And this is what I am thinking about after watching Not Not Jane’s. Rest is resistance. Rest is revolutionary. To rest is to allow yourself to breathe when no one else will let you.

The linguistic gymnastics Mara performs in this play are miraculous. The acting across the board is sublime. I laughed with my whole body through every scene. And I am left thinking deeply about the profundity of a chair.

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Not Not Jane's ran through June 13, 2025 at the wild project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series.