Artistic Statement
My name is Ben M. Jones, and I write some sort-of-weird shit. Hi!
To be a little more specific, what I’ve found myself writing is mostly things which interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and the impact they have on how we live our lives. Much of this happens through the lens of my queerness; how our social expectations around sex and sexuality shape behavior and expectations. Particularly as a man, there are expectations to be—if not sexually aggressive, certainly assertive and broadly dominant, for example. And when these expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves that uphold these expectations, stop matching with reality, there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict and drama.
I don’t normally phrase my topics as questions so much as I prefer to think about them as shining lights on perspectives and experiences that are normally left out in the dark. If I were to frame them as questions, they’d be along the line of “Why do we believe X” or “What happens when we realize Y isn’t always true?”
Because these stories often deal with beliefs, ideas, and perspectives, a thing I’ve taken to saying is that my plays are all, at least partially, set inside someone’s head. And this informs the shape of what my writing looks like. I tend not to be a fan of naturalism or realism—although I might use those styles as entryways into my real artistic intentions. Using these abstract subjects such as beliefs, ideas, and stories, and also using an explicitly abstract setting of “someone’s brain”, my work necessarily ends up moving from a naturalist setting and style of presentation into a more abstract one—if it doesn’t just start in an abstract world.
The shapes of the abstract worlds I build will, necessarily, vary depending on the show and the concepts I am trying to handle, but something I find myself continuing to come back to is revealing the action of the play as being storytelling rather than reality—I try to avoid the cheap “it’s all been a dream” ending, and rather I want to lean into some sense that the rules we’ve been playing by are not rules we actually need to play by.
Rules like not ending sentences with a preposition, for example. Like the last sentence of that last paragraph did. This, by the way, gives you a clue to my sense of humor and the attention to detail I try to bring to my writing.
To be a little more specific, what I’ve found myself writing is mostly things which interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and the impact they have on how we live our lives. Much of this happens through the lens of my queerness; how our social expectations around sex and sexuality shape behavior and expectations. Particularly as a man, there are expectations to be—if not sexually aggressive, certainly assertive and broadly dominant, for example. And when these expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves that uphold these expectations, stop matching with reality, there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict and drama.
I don’t normally phrase my topics as questions so much as I prefer to think about them as shining lights on perspectives and experiences that are normally left out in the dark. If I were to frame them as questions, they’d be along the line of “Why do we believe X” or “What happens when we realize Y isn’t always true?”
Because these stories often deal with beliefs, ideas, and perspectives, a thing I’ve taken to saying is that my plays are all, at least partially, set inside someone’s head. And this informs the shape of what my writing looks like. I tend not to be a fan of naturalism or realism—although I might use those styles as entryways into my real artistic intentions. Using these abstract subjects such as beliefs, ideas, and stories, and also using an explicitly abstract setting of “someone’s brain”, my work necessarily ends up moving from a naturalist setting and style of presentation into a more abstract one—if it doesn’t just start in an abstract world.
The shapes of the abstract worlds I build will, necessarily, vary depending on the show and the concepts I am trying to handle, but something I find myself continuing to come back to is revealing the action of the play as being storytelling rather than reality—I try to avoid the cheap “it’s all been a dream” ending, and rather I want to lean into some sense that the rules we’ve been playing by are not rules we actually need to play by.
Rules like not ending sentences with a preposition, for example. Like the last sentence of that last paragraph did. This, by the way, gives you a clue to my sense of humor and the attention to detail I try to bring to my writing.
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Ben M. Jones
Artistic Statement
My name is Ben M. Jones, and I write some sort-of-weird shit. Hi!
To be a little more specific, what I’ve found myself writing is mostly things which interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and the impact they have on how we live our lives. Much of this happens through the lens of my queerness; how our social expectations around sex and sexuality shape behavior and expectations. Particularly as a man, there are expectations to be—if not sexually aggressive, certainly assertive and broadly dominant, for example. And when these expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves that uphold these expectations, stop matching with reality, there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict and drama.
I don’t normally phrase my topics as questions so much as I prefer to think about them as shining lights on perspectives and experiences that are normally left out in the dark. If I were to frame them as questions, they’d be along the line of “Why do we believe X” or “What happens when we realize Y isn’t always true?”
Because these stories often deal with beliefs, ideas, and perspectives, a thing I’ve taken to saying is that my plays are all, at least partially, set inside someone’s head. And this informs the shape of what my writing looks like. I tend not to be a fan of naturalism or realism—although I might use those styles as entryways into my real artistic intentions. Using these abstract subjects such as beliefs, ideas, and stories, and also using an explicitly abstract setting of “someone’s brain”, my work necessarily ends up moving from a naturalist setting and style of presentation into a more abstract one—if it doesn’t just start in an abstract world.
The shapes of the abstract worlds I build will, necessarily, vary depending on the show and the concepts I am trying to handle, but something I find myself continuing to come back to is revealing the action of the play as being storytelling rather than reality—I try to avoid the cheap “it’s all been a dream” ending, and rather I want to lean into some sense that the rules we’ve been playing by are not rules we actually need to play by.
Rules like not ending sentences with a preposition, for example. Like the last sentence of that last paragraph did. This, by the way, gives you a clue to my sense of humor and the attention to detail I try to bring to my writing.
To be a little more specific, what I’ve found myself writing is mostly things which interrogate the stories we tell ourselves and the impact they have on how we live our lives. Much of this happens through the lens of my queerness; how our social expectations around sex and sexuality shape behavior and expectations. Particularly as a man, there are expectations to be—if not sexually aggressive, certainly assertive and broadly dominant, for example. And when these expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves that uphold these expectations, stop matching with reality, there’s a lot of opportunity for conflict and drama.
I don’t normally phrase my topics as questions so much as I prefer to think about them as shining lights on perspectives and experiences that are normally left out in the dark. If I were to frame them as questions, they’d be along the line of “Why do we believe X” or “What happens when we realize Y isn’t always true?”
Because these stories often deal with beliefs, ideas, and perspectives, a thing I’ve taken to saying is that my plays are all, at least partially, set inside someone’s head. And this informs the shape of what my writing looks like. I tend not to be a fan of naturalism or realism—although I might use those styles as entryways into my real artistic intentions. Using these abstract subjects such as beliefs, ideas, and stories, and also using an explicitly abstract setting of “someone’s brain”, my work necessarily ends up moving from a naturalist setting and style of presentation into a more abstract one—if it doesn’t just start in an abstract world.
The shapes of the abstract worlds I build will, necessarily, vary depending on the show and the concepts I am trying to handle, but something I find myself continuing to come back to is revealing the action of the play as being storytelling rather than reality—I try to avoid the cheap “it’s all been a dream” ending, and rather I want to lean into some sense that the rules we’ve been playing by are not rules we actually need to play by.
Rules like not ending sentences with a preposition, for example. Like the last sentence of that last paragraph did. This, by the way, gives you a clue to my sense of humor and the attention to detail I try to bring to my writing.