Jenna White has a lot of time on her hands these days. Last year, she was busy nursing a crumbling young marriage, now ending in a divorce. Today, things are much quieter.
“It’s amazing how much time becomes available when you’re getting a divorce,” White said. “Your life is suddenly kind of a blank slate.”
While still struggling in her marriage, White longed to connect with a community of women in similar circumstances. She wanted to hear the trials and tragedies of other women – and the ways in which they bounced back and transformed themselves. She began writing a non-fiction book, dedicated to the topic.
Once her divorce was imminent, White decided to take the project one step further.
“I just really felt, in my bones, called to create some kind of event around bringing women together for the purposes of sharing stories,” White said.
So she’s using her newfound free time to create an original performance scripted by real women and performed by local actors.
White grew up in Oak Park but now lives in Forest Park. She recently connected with Oak Parker Eden Novak DeGenova, and the two women bonded over their shared love of performance arts and their history working in local theater. They were also both working on similar projects, focused on female empowerment.
“She was working on a project that was a little more focused on older women but a similar concept,” said White. They’d found the perfect partnership.
The two teamed up to create She Comes Undone: Meditations from Women Mustering the Audacity to Make Themselves Happy, a live performance set to debut on July 20 at FitzGerald’s Nightclub in Berwyn.
“The way that we’re thinking about that it, this is sort of the inaugural event,” said White, of the first performance. But she hopes that it’s the first of many. “We would love for this to be an ongoing thing.”
In her vision, the script for each performance would be different every time. But this time around, the event will feature poetry, puppetry, music, monologues, and more.
Even for the creator, the show is a challenge to describe.
“It’s hard, because they’re all so different,” she said. But some 15 to 20 voices will be represented during the performance.
One sequence, for instance, is the story of a woman’s marriage to an immigrant who married her, essentially, for a green card. The story is told using puppets. It’s a comedy and a tragedy, all wrapped into one.
“They’re painful, but they’re also humorous, they’re also absurd,” White said.
But marriage isn’t the only theme. “We’ve got this gorgeous piece that was written by a woman who is facing life-threatening cancer,” White said. “And yet it’s incredibly inspiring. It teaches us…how to live right in the moment.”
Her own tale is in there, too. “My story is really looking at what the real dirt was of being married to an alcoholic,” White said. “And what the lifespan of a very short…three-year marriage…actually looked like.”
The decision to divorce prompted White to reprioritize, and look back into some of the things she’d been passionate about as a young woman and child.
“One of the things that I realized that I had really cast aside was writing,” she said. “That’s really been my passion. I kept diaries at the age of five. I was always writing.”
She’d also spent years involved in theater, at Oak Park and River Forest High School, in CAST, Circle Theatre, and Village Players. She went on to study playwriting and directing at Bennington College in Vermont, and later worked on launching a theater company in New Mexico. When she embarked upon her mission to create She Comes Undone, White was no stranger to the stage.
White’s goal is still to forge a strong community of women, who together can speak out about life’s setbacks. She said she believes women all too often bury their stories in shame. “I think that can be very destructive. It isolates us,” White said. “It’s also just really bad modeling for younger women, to pretend that things are fine.”
During the collapse of her marriage, White said it was critical, to her, to be as authentic as possible about what has happening. With She Comes Undone, other women have a chance to do the same.
“It’s time consuming, but when it’s a passion project like this it’s amazing how you find the time,” she said. “Anything we can do to sort of speak truthfully and fearlessly about what it means to be a woman today, we’re all better for it.”