Jenny Lyn Bader: The Plot's The Thing
In a nationwide count of multigifted, superprolific, honors-bedecked young writers, 29-year-old Jenny Lyn Bader would have to be among the top 10.
Wannabe creative types lallygagging around with your writer's block and your rejection slips: Read her bio and weep.
For openers, her short essays have been included in such acclaimed anthologies as "Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation," "Ethics," "American Voices," "The Blair Reader," "Signs of Life in the U.S.A.," and "Who We Are." Early dramatic works have been produced at Primary Stages, The New Group, Center Stage, John Houseman Studio Theatre, Village Gate, West Bank Cafe, New Georges, and the HERE performance space.
Nantucket Prizewinner
Last year, an excerpt from a historical drama, "Petticoat Government," was done by the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab.
This summer, "Miss America," about a politically correct beauty pageant contestant, was produced at the first New York International Fringe Festival, while another drama, "Artists," won first prize at the Nantucket Short Play Festival. It features a homeless girl who lives inside an installation in an art gallery.
Ms. Bader has two short plays running simultaneously in Manhattan the moment: "Past Lives," at the Pulse Ensemble Theatre's Discovery Project, and "Love Scene," at the Trading Fours company's Center Stage.
Two Plays At Once
"Yes, it is possible to be in two places at once - I just spent a week playing down the street from myself," she said during a recent interview at the East Hampton house owned by her stepfather, the musical-writer Joseph Stein ("Fiddler on the Roof"), and her mother, the actress-turned-psychotherapist Elisa Loti.
Ms. Bader is, in addition, the creator and author of "@ Watercooler," the Internet's first soap opera serial, now in its second season on the Microsoft Network.
What else? Well, she hosts live chats for The New York Times's theater forum on America Online, and teaches a class on new-media writing at the New School.
Wait - here's the kicker. Her first book is being published by Warner Books on Monday.
Gap Between The Sexes
Written with Bill Brazell, an old friend who lives in California, the book, "He Meant/She Meant: The Definitive Male-Female Dictionary," purports to bridge the communication gap between the sexes through penetrating, gender-specific vocabulary analysis.
It is subtitled "What Men Think They're Saying; What Women Really Mean."
"If Samuel Johnson and Erma Bombeck were locked in a hotel room with a laptop and a bottle of bourbon, the comic result might be 'He Meant/She Meant' . . . or one funny baby," says a jacket blurb.
"It's only $5.99, and makes an excellent holiday gift," the author observed.
Such multifarious accomplishment boggles the mind; one can scarcely imagine the driving intelligence purring inside this charming, articulate, slightly exotic-looking young woman flipping her long black hair around and occasionally giggling with just a vestige of youthful vulnerability.
" 'Past Lives' is about an alternate-modality, past-life regression therapist who's good at dealing with the dead but not with her own life problems," Ms. Bader said of her most recent play. "It's also about the whole New Age community."
"It's funny - maybe it's because my hair's longer now and I'm wearing more bohemian clothes - but when I tell people I wrote a play about past-life regression, they think I'm some kind of freak."
Millennial Anxiety
The play is both a comedy/parody of the New Age world and an exploration of its emotional validity and ramifications, she said, adding, "I actually know someone who's inviting Mae West to a seance this weekend in the hope of obtaining the rights to one of her plays."
In a theme-related essay called "Apocalypse Momentarily," she deplores the fantastical spiritual anxiety and the scientific millennial theories that are polarizing a society incapable of embracing intuitive experience and rational skepticism simultaneously.
"It's so divisive that it's really a fertile topic," she said.
Highest Harvard Honors
Born in New York City, Ms. Bader attended the Dalton School for 15 years, starting out in the nursery school before it was eliminated as being too competitive. She majored in English literature at Harvard, "where," she said, "nothing is eliminated for being too competitive."
She was fiction editor of the Harvard Advocate, acted in nine plays and directed five, and graduated summa cum laude in 1990.
Among her honors were the Whitehill Prize, "for the junior who best represents the tradition of humane letters and arts," and the Caroline Isenberg Award "for outstanding contribution to the performing arts."
Never A Blocked Moment
As an undergraduate, studying fiction writing with Michael Martone and poetry with Seamus Heaney, Ms. Bader embraced the Bertolt Brecht doctrine that calls for "keeping your butt on a chair for 10 years until you become fluent," to paraphrase loosely.
"I've always been a dynamo. By kindergarten, I was an impresario," she laughed. "But now I really have my discipline act together: never a moment of writer's block."
"I think the more things you do, the more incentives you have to do more. Of course, checks and deadlines help."
She Means
Amid all this busy productivity, are there pauses for personal moments? "Oh, yes! I have plenty of time for a lot of kooky friends and a great boyfriend. Read my definitions of 'busy' in my new book," she advised.
Here they are:
SHE MEANS: Utterly swamped unless someone special calls.
HE MEANS: Utterly swamped unless someone special dies.
"He Meant/She Meant" had its roots in a magazine article called "The Everlasting Yes, No, Maybe" in which Ms. Bader asserts that when women say yes they mean no, and when men say no, they mean maybe.
An editor suggested she expand the concept into a book, in collaboration with a man to insure sexual equality.
"I made a list of all the male writers I knew, crossed out the ones who didn't meet deadlines or were androgynous, circled the ones who were funny, and ended up with Bill, who rowed on the crew in college, plays pickup basketball, and is really guyish, even though he had a rather feminine literary style until he learned to channel his masculinity into his writing."
@ Watercooler
The collaborators selected their list of debatable words, then set about defining them in a seriously joking way. "We wanted our jokes to be helpful," Ms. Bader explained.
Her Web soap "@ Watercooler," is an office drama based on a 13-week, 26-episode television format. It opens with a 250-word dramatic monologue about a recent happening that creates a career-related dilemma: "The boss came on to me," or "A client just asked me to procure a call girl for him."
Three solutions to the dilemma, or "trilemma," are presented. For example: A) Get the call girl, B) Never speak to this client again, C) Ask a male colleague to get the call girl.
Office Dilemmas
The audience comments and also votes, logging on later to hear the outcome and what the character actually does. "Characters don't always follow advice," Ms. Bader said. "I can make them do the wrong or stupid thing, as people will."
Users can also go into a chat room to discuss the dilemma with experts. People like Lillian Vernon, the catalogue entrepreneur, Linda Obst, the film producer, or anyone who's written a book on career or success is considered an expert, and will suggest ways to handle similar problems.
"The fun part is that the story occupies a really unique space on the fiction/reality continuum, specifically informing your life with the amazingly passionate involvement of an interactive audience," said Ms. Bader.
Speedy Gratification
"We used to call it a Web soap, but that sounded much too passive and trivial. It's an interactive serial drama attached to a serious career site."
"I think a formative traumatic experience may account for my obsession with narrative continuity," she said. As a child her baby-sitter lured her into watching a daytime soap in which a will was read while its supposedly deceased writer hid in a closet.
Young Jenny spent days waiting for the character to emerge, but eventually lost interest when, in old soap tradition, the outing of the woman was delayed beyond her attention span.
"That's why I'm hooked on plot," she said. "On '@ Watercooler,' gratification always occurs within a half-hour."
Theater Is Life
Having grown up with parents who took her to the theater almost every night, even in foreign countries, Ms. Bader is, she says, hopelessly drama-oriented. For her, a theater is a place to hang out.
She is currently working on a three-act comedy, "Manhattan Casanova," about a serial seducer.
"I haven't seen a lot of sights - I was always sitting in the dark - but being a playwright has become a natural way for me to live."
"It's a weird life, because it's abnormal to think that theater is more normal than life, but to me, that's the way it is," she concluded.