There’s a scene in Jen Silverman‘s 2021 novel We Play Ourselves in which its narrator, failed playwright Cass, relives the moment that made her floundering career crash and burn.

The incident occurs at an opening night party in celebration of Cass’s rival, Tara-Jean Slater — a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind who personifies all that Cass was supposed to be, and isn’t. Cass sees their destinies as cruelly linked, the artistic acclaim that should have been hers diverted to Tara-Jean as if by a cosmic error; and her obsessive preoccupation with the unfairness of it all propels much of the novel, narrowing to a menacing point of fixation when the two finally encounter each other in person.

Tara-Jean is confused, then frightened, as Cass crowds into her, getting almost nose-to-nose as she searches the young star’s face for something that will explain Tara-Jean’s stratospheric success and her own failure. “Our faces were so close that her eyes looked like one giant copper eye,” Cass recalls. “There were green flecks inside that copper eye. Was that the mark of fate?”

In this almost mesmerized state, Cass jabs an exploratory finger into Tara-Jean’s eye, injuring her. The spectacle is captured by a panopticon of phone cameras, and Cass is swiftly “cancelled” on social media and in the New York theater scene. The echo of Greek epic, comically permuted, is clearly if absurdly legible: Cass is a kind of dipshit Odysseus, less a warrior than a walking locus of bad judgment and self-hatred, and Tara-Jean essentially a bystander, transformed into a Cyclops by the disfiguring power of Cass’s jealousy.

The scene is memorable to me both for its hilarity and for how unmistakably it bears Silverman’s signature: the inescapable theatricality of its emotional scale and sweep, even — especially — in tiny moments of intimacy; the sometimes erotic tension between enmity and envy; the darkly comic embrace of human folly; the nimble alchemizing of well-trod source material into something familiar, but entirely Silverman’s own.

Reading it jogged my memory of one of their earlier theatrical works, the unpublished Little Ugly, which introduced me to Silverman the playwright in 2014. Little Ugly is a grungily fanciful reimagining of Prometheus Bound, set in a dismal port city where black market operatives abduct the poor, the unhoused, the forgotten, and surgically extract their dreams for the recreational consumption of the wealthy and bored. I thought, too, of The Roommate (which enjoyed a 2024 Broadway run starring Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow), in which a neurotic empty-nester unwittingly rents out her guest bedroom to a fugitive, sparking a late-in-life reckoning with questions of sexuality and selfhood.

Materially, the three works bear little resemblance to one another, but thematically there is a shared pulse, a collective reaching — in some cases, a clawing — toward something beyond life as Silverman’s characters know it. Setting, mood, and form all vary, but underneath there is a steady thrum that says There must be something more than this.

“I think I come back to the same obsessions again and again, from different lenses,” Silverman says. “The question of transformation, whether or not we are capable of change; how far people will go to feel visible, to be perceived the way they long to be perceived; intimacy as a radical or dangerous act; how we get trapped by systemic power dynamics; what it takes to break free. I can’t shake these questions so I just keep asking myself versions of them.”

That investigative recursion has yielded a prolific body of work, and a slew of associated honors. As of this writing, Silverman — a three-time MacDowell fellow and a New Dramatists alum; a Yale Drama Series Award recipient and a Pushcart Prize winner, to list only a few of their distinctions — has published nine plays, two novels, a book of poetry, and a short story collection.

Their essays have appeared in Vogue and The Paris Review. They’ve written for Netflix’s Tales of the City and HBO’s Tokyo Vice, and indeed their half of our email correspondence came from inside the writers’ room for a yet-to-be-divulged television series. Additionally, they informed me, they’re collaborating with Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) on a musical adaptation of Darren Aronofsky’s ballet thriller Black Swan, which will have its out-of-town premiere this spring at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But first, on October 18th, Silverman’s Witch will open after preview performances the 16th and 17th at Portland’s Profile Theatre, under the stewardship of artistic director Josh Hecht.

When programming Profile’s 2025-2026 season, Hecht says that the company prioritized “life- affirming, intersectional stories” and “comedy that had heft.”

Two summers ago, he recalls, “We had just produced two world premieres in a row, and I was exhausted. When I read [Witch], it just totally rejuvenated and reinspired me. It reminded me of everything that excites me about producing theater, about directing theater.”

The result of that revival was a double-header season lineup that pairs Silverman with New Dramatists resident Mike Lew (Teenage Dick, Bhangin’ It) to bring Profile audiences three full-scale productions — Silverman’s Witch, Lew’s Tiger Style!, and Silverman’s The Roommate — plus staged readings of two new works- in-progress (Silverman’s Untitled Houdini Play and Lew’s Alpha Asians).

Of the pairing, Hecht says, “There’s something that feels with both of them like the voice of our generation. There’s a freshness and a contemporariness that I really love about folding the two of them together. They’re both really theatrical in their exploration of what a play can do, and they take risks with form. They take risks with humor, and what can be funny.”

Comedic and formal risk-taking are both front and center in Witch, an adaptation of the Jacobean tragicomedy The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford.

“Most of the ‘witch plays’ from [the 17th century] are essentially propaganda plays,” Silverman explains. “They instruct people on what to do if they have a witch in their midst.

The Witch of Edmonton is the only one I’ve read that boldly announces to the audience that it is going to do this, and then does entirely the opposite.”

The original Witch of Edmonton consists of three intersecting plots, each having to do with the Devil’s influence over the inhabitants of a small rural community. The most central storyline concerns the elderly Mother Sawyer who, Silverman clarifies, “isn’t a witch at all. She’s just reviled by her neighbors.” Mother Sawyer is so hated, in fact, that she can’t even venture outside to collect firewood without being harassed and beaten by hostile townsfolk. Reflecting on her predicament, she says:

“Some call me witch,
And being ignorant of myself, they go About to teach me how to be one …”

Mother Sawyer hasn’t really done anything to invite the contempt of her neighbors. Her offenses include being “poor, deformed, and ignorant,” and, yes, wishing ill on her tormentors, but only in retaliation for their constant abuse. After a lifetime of persecution and double-standards, she is understandably bitter — and vengeful.

And then, Silverman synopsizes, “The Devil shows up and says, ‘You aren’t a witch, but would you like to be one?'”

It’s a tempting offer: demonically assisted revenge against all who’ve wronged her in exchange for her mere body and soul. Mother Sawyer considers the bargain and, reasoning that she has little to lose, accepts, sealing the deal with a blood pact. Within the moral economy of The Witch of Edmonton, it’s made clear that this is a grievous miscalculation for which Mother Sawyer’s ultimate penalty is death. But, progressively for its time, the play assigns equal responsibility to the community for fueling her corruption, first by spreading malicious gossip at her expense, and later by making a tawdry spectacle of her trial.

“The original play asks the audience to sympathize with her in a way that’s so disarming and subversive,” Silverman says. “I’d always wanted to engage with it.”

If The Witch of Edmonton is a somewhat blunt critique of an unjust society, Witch feels more like a vivisection, cutting its own narrative path away from the moralistic universe of its predecessor. “My play is a bit different,” Silverman says, “in that it revolves around the twin questions of despair and hope, and asks how, and if, we can alter the communal systems inside which we’re trapped.”

Here Silverman resists sermonizing, even as they expose the prejudices and hypocrisies of Witch‘s world, laying them out for examination without urging any pat conclusions. The result is an ingenious alloy of 17th-century social norms and trappings with heady, decidedly contemporary dialogue, all commingling to investigate some timeless anxieties: What is an acceptable price of admission to simply be a person in the world? Which of its terms and conditions are intolerable? Can it — we — be redeemed? Or are we better off burning it all down and calling it a day?

These questions are explored primarily through two- and three-person scenes of precision-tooled dialogue, which form the bulk of the play’s narrative body. “[Silverman manages] to wring such incredible intensity out of two-person scenes in a really economic way,” says director Josh Hecht. “The sense of danger, the sense of tension, the desire, the fear, all of that is thrilling.”

It’s also extremely funny. With so much existential angst at its core, Witch could, in the hands of a less skilled playwright, descend into melodrama. But Silverman’s comedic instincts buoy the solemnity of the play’s central premises. “Dark comedy is also something I return to again and again,” Silverman observes, “because it’s a vessel for so much that we couldn’t look at otherwise.”

“There’s a lot about hope, hopelessness, desire, loneliness,” says cast member Jessica Tidd. “It’s kind of a confrontation: Can you have hope? What does that feel like, to have hope? What does it feel like to try to voice a hope and then, in doing so, destroy it?”

These dramatic tensions connect Silverman’s work to a rich lineage of artistic forebears.

“The first plays I ever encountered, that made me want to understand what the form was and how to work in it, were by Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill,” Silverman recalls. “Their work is vividly theatrical, structurally innovative. Challenging in terms of what they ask an audience to witness and consider and feel. Plays that are built so deliberately with theatrical tools, they don’t transpose into another medium.”

Kane (Blasted, 4.48 Psychosis) and Churchill (Cloud 9, Love and Information) are both acknowledged pioneers of the modern stage: Kane for her unrestrained depictions of mental illness, violence, and alienation; Churchill for her investigations of gender, class, and capitalism, and for the continuous innovations of structure and form that have characterized her sixty-year career.

“Kane’s work is incredibly uncomfortable,” Silverman says. “As a young person her plays felt truly dangerous to me, but the provocation isn’t empty. There’s real intention behind it, a real exploration of violence and its legacies. And Churchill is a chameleon, reinventing form and content from piece to piece, unapologetic in those reinventions, constantly pushing at the edges of what a play is and why.”

Churchill’s influence in particular feels discernible in Witch’s blending of the real and surreal, in its use of language to challenge and reshape dramatic convention, in its interrogations of patriarchy and class hegemony, and, significantly, in its foregrounding of the complex, contentious, thorny woman with whom it asks us to sympathize.

“This is the first character I’ve played where weariness, pain, and resentment are freely on display,” says actor Lauren Modica-Soloway, who plays Elizabeth. “[She] is an off-putting and unnerving presence in her world, and in ours. There’s no shallow end: You commit to full eye contact, and she’ll laugh if you flinch.”

This recalcitrance is on full display whether Elizabeth is dealing with another villager, or the very Devil — here depicted as a rakish door-to-door salesman named Scratch. Unlike her antecedent Mother Sawyer, who bargains her soul away with minimal persuasion, Elizabeth is a stubborn sell. She counters the offer with her own terms and conditions, insisting on being given the same pitch Scratch would make to a man, and the deal she proposes in exchange for her soul is sobering even to him.

“Every character is redeemable,” says Modica-Soloway. “But Elizabeth seems to be struggling with whether or not she wants to be redeemed, even for sins she didn’t commit.”

The question of redemption — not from sin, but from the invisible power structures governing our lives — hangs over the heads of all of Witch‘s six characters. Elizabeth is isolated by her failure to conform to prevailing norms, but so, in a way, is everyone else peopling her village.

Sir Arthur Banks (George Mount) entertains guests from within an emasculating silo of grief for his late wife. Cuddy (Charles Grant), his Morris-dancing son, too effete to be a worthy heir, is painfully aware that he’s being slowly but surely squeezed out of the line of succession in favor of Sir Arthur’s protege, Frank (whom Cuddy not-so-privately loathes and lusts after in equal measure). Sir Arthur’s vision for Frank (Logan Bailey) involves wedding him to a woman of suitable pedigree, and to satisfy him the ambitious Frank must conceal his marriage to Winnifred (Jessica Tidd), Sir Arthur’s scullery maid.

Winnifred conveys her resentment through silent glares as she clears tables and refills glasses, burdened by the knowledge that she must remain a secret — and by secrets of her own. Even Scratch (Joshua J. Weinstein) wears his supernatural standing a bit like an ill-fitting uniform, characterizing himself as a “junior salesman,” and even forgetting to file some paperwork required to complete a soul contract. In their particular ways, the residents of Edmonton are all living half-lives, but they keep on bartering away bits and pieces of themselves just in case they break even one day.

“And if a soul is what that costs, I don’t think that’s so much, really,” Winnifred ponders late in the play, “because what’s a soul ever done for me?”

It’s a kind of plea, and Witch answers it with no easy fixes, no trite reassurances. Instead it invites the audience to ruminate alongside its creator.

“Just paying attention to what’s happening around me becomes a process of constant questioning,” Silverman says. “Asking about what is happening, and then trying to look underneath that to why it’s happening, what pre-existing, embedded structures are perpetuating it. And theater is such an amazing medium for asking hard questions. When I can’t shake a question, when it really gets embedded under my skin over time, then [it] often ends up yielding a play.”

The question at the center of Witch is: “Do I have hope that things can get better?”

“And if you do,” it counsels the audience, “then ignore me. You’re fine. But if you don’t … then maybe this is where we start.”

***

Profile Theatre’s production of Jen Silverman’s Witch previews Oct. 16-17, opens Oct. 18, and continues through Nov. 2. Performances are in the Ellyn Bye Studio at Portland Center Stage’s home space in The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.