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Daily Inspiration: Meet Jennifer Skura Boutell

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Skura Boutell.

Hi Jennifer, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Besides being a mom and writing plays, making theatre is the only thing I wake up every single day wanting to do. Most of the people I’ve worked with over the years also want the same thing. We’re drawn to writing, experimenting, and sharing personal stories that might make a difference. For me, that difference would be to help heal wounds caused by toxic shame.

I wrote and performed my first play for my seventh-grade History Club in my Dallas, Texas junior high school. It was a two-hander about the cruelties of the Salem witch trials. My best friend and I stood center stage sweating in my mother’s plus-size shoulder pads reenacting my version of the infamous young witches’ fates. I played The Judge and she was The Lawyer. (Who needs witches in a witch story?) Lights up and I watched my bestie go violently pale. I panicked, said all her lines as well as my own. Of course, I changed my voice.

After many years of ballet, speech contests, musicals, and summers on a stage, I received a scholarship to study theatre at Sam Houston State University. After four years, I left for Los Angeles with an overexposed black-and-white headshot and a B.F.A. in performing arts. I worked a lot of odd jobs while I studied and worked in film and television. I survived in a studio off Sunset and Melrose with a Murphy bed and at one point, not having a car, walked across the street to see if the cemetery was hiring. For a time, I ended up hosting funerals and working as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator at Universal Studios. I finally got a car and found myself making plays with the Knightsbridge Theatre company’s continual 5-show rep. On New Year’s Eve in 2001, I left my beautiful west coast friends for the east coast, landed at LaGuardia, and woke up in New York City without ever having visited.

I crashed on couches and illegal commercial lofts in Brooklyn where I showered in photographer’s dark rooms and hid my bed when the landlord came. I was lucky enough to make a lot of guerrilla, DIY theatre and got to play with folks in Blue Man Group, Monk Parrots, Barefoot, Tyna, Avalon Studios, and D3C—innovative artists who still inspire me. We experimented in warehouses, parking lots, rooftops, bars, galleries, hotels, parks, living rooms, anywhere we could stand the weather and the culture. We were addicted to reenacting the human absurdities around us and hoped to ignite conversations about issues we wanted to see changed. By day, I did odd jobs and desk jockeyed for a temp agency.

Eventually, I took on more money-minded gigs, moved upstate to Tivoli, NY, and started a family. We played with theatre companies there including Tangent, Half Moon, and Howlcollaboring with even more thespian addicts until one day, the leader of one of our playwriting groups suggested I look into a writing degree at Goddard College.

Next thing you know, I’m in Vermont for a biannual residency with creators from all over the world. With a son still in diapers and a full-time job on hold, I received a scholarship to learn to tell my stories with writers who became some of the most influential people in my life. We were all obsessed with trying to tell our stories in our best voices, with many of us having the distinct intent to help heal not only others who might experience our work but also ourselves. The campus environment felt epic and ancient. I remember noticing a personal serendipity when we gathered to study in a sacred garden house containing rafters that were made from salvaged wood of the Salem witch gallows.

Since achieving my M.F.A., my thesis play and my teaching practicum have become actuated examples of my passion for helping people eliminate toxic shame, and I am continuing to share more work of the same nature with like-minded Atlanta theatre makers.

Shortly after moving here, I was lucky enough to meet friends with these same shared interests who worked and played in the vibrant indie theatre scene. We became each other’s quarantine bubbles and gathered to rehearse in garages, parks and found-spaces in order to continue to create. We wrote together, played together, fell in love, left old lives, watched each other’s kids, and helped each other grow. We still do. Over the past couple of years, we’ve incubated our own processes and encouraged each other to stick to our passions for enabling entertaining and healing work.

I’m honored to be a founding member of Some Bodies Theatre Collective (SBTC) where we produce personal and raw experiments often based in a somatic directing style we call Micromanners.

I’m so very lucky to be here in Atlanta with people I love, honing their art and my own plays, like A MAD WOMAN’S BREAKFAST, BOOGER GIRL, and THEY KNOW NOT: AN EPIC BURLESQUE OF TRAGIC PROPORTIONS. It’s thrilling to watch work come to life with this incredibly generous, curious, exciting, eclectic, and motley community of like-minded theatre junkies.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Most of my writing is fictionalized auto drama—memoiresque. It’s about many of my struggles with my past experiences of abuse and trauma and toxic shame. To me, nothing is really “smooth” but I just don’t consider anything to be an obstacle anymore. Maybe that’s an obstacle in itself? Maybe it keeps me from being driven to a certain kind of success? But I really do wake up grateful just to be here. I am able to work, help raise my son, have a beautiful roof over my head, and be around amazing people who aren’t afraid to share their gifts and their lives and help me share mine.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Mom, Playwright, Theatremaker, Performing Artist, Poet, Blogger, Painter, Educator

Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
Come see more Atlanta theatre! I’m lucky to say we indie theatre makers have a lot of projects in the works for the next couple of years and while we can’t be sure of anything, we guarantee it won’t be boring!

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Jennifer Skura Boutell, Howl Playwrights, SBTC, Dixon Place NYC, Goddard College, Synchronicity Theater, Monk Parrots, Chuck McCollum, John-Paul Steele

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