Jennifer Barclay Main Page

Jennifer desires to write plays which are full of raw, muscular humanity and peopled with juicy, scenery-chewing characters. She endeavors to find the electrifying middle ground between personal story and political metaphor.

Until now, Jennifer has only lived in cold places. She grew up in Rochester, NY, and then moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University. At Northwestern, she studied acting with David Downs, performance studies with Frank Galati, playwriting with John Logan, and solo performance with Mary Zimmerman. During Zimmerman’s class, Jennifer developed her one-woman show, Clearing Hedges: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, in which she snaps between seven different characters (including Babe, her lesbian lover, and her 400 pound Greek wrestler husband).

After graduating, Jennifer backpacked solo across Europe for a year, until she found a home at the International Theatre of Vienna. She stayed on for a while as a company member, performing Clearing Hedges during the week, and acting in the now-and-forever-masterpiece The Mousetrap on weekends. In 2002, Jennifer took Clearing Hedges to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. After rave reviews and a crash course in what it means to be a producer, actor, and playwright all at once, she continued touring the show to Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

When her backpack grew too heavy, Jennifer settled back in Chicago. For six years, she worked as an actor at Steppenwolf, Court Theatre, Collaboraction, Live Bait, and others. She taught acting at Piven Theatre, Court, and Apple Tree, taught playwriting with Pegasus Players, and taught an absurd amount of pilates and spinning classes across the city. But eventually, Jennifer found it more rewarding to shift her focus to playwriting.

Her first ensemble play, The Human Capacity, was given a staged reading at Steppenwolf in their First Look Festival of New Works. The Human Capacity and her next play, Plunder, were developed through readings and workshops across Chicago at Piven, A Red Orchid, Northlight, Breadline, Stage Left, and American Theatre Company. Freedom, NY was produced in UCSD’s Baldwin New Plays Festival 2007, and was just co-produced in March by Teatro Vista and Remy Bumppo at Victory Gardens in Chicago. This year, Jennifer has developed two new plays, Eat It Too and The Attic Dwellers, through UCSD readings and workshops. The Attic Dwellers will be produced in UCSD’s Baldwin Festival, April 2008.

Jennifer’s work has taken her to writing residencies from the hills of Virginia to the backcountry of Scotland. While living and writing in Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, she met the English writer Andrew Newsham who wrote her love poems and took her on walks along the North River Esk. They got married and moved to San Diego where Jennifer is in her second year as an MFA playwright at UC San Diego, studying under Naomi Iizuka. She is enjoying the surreal San Diego life where, on her writing breaks, she can go lie under a palm tree in the sun by the pool.

This summer, Andrew and Jennifer are creating their own private writing retreat in a flat in Paris, where they’ll collaborate on a screenplay and a TV pilot.

For a full list of credits, please see Jennifer’s resume.