Jacob Juntunen, PhD - Associate Professor Dramatic Theory, Criticism and Playwriting - Head of the MFA Playwriting Program - Southern Illinois University
Wow, what to tell you about Jacob Juntunen? Long before he was the father of an elementary school kid, long before he was the head of the playwriting MFA at Southern Illinois University (SIU), and long before he lived in St. Louis, he was a little kid himself watching the puppets on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street in California during the 1970s. He misses mainstream representations of that PBS masculinity that he still hopes to embody. Later, Jacob was a high school dropout, depressed and making sandwiches at a deli in Portland during the 1990s. In Portland, he was saved by the teachers at Clackamas Community College and he was given purpose in Houston by Edward Albee (long story; ask Jacob about it and he’ll probably do his Albee impersonation). Jacob ended up with an English degree from Reed College, and an interdisciplinary theatre PhD from Northwestern, and then he did a year at Ohio University’s MFA playwriting program, which was a weird order, doing that after the PhD, but so it goes.
For the past ten years, he’s primarily collaborated with his students at SIU, making theatre out of nothing but a black box with blocks and cubes. More recently he founded Contraband Theatre to use radical hospitality to produce plays that highlight the fly-over region in which he lives. Since 2000, a couple years after he saw a scratchy VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre with mannequins (puppets for adults!!), he’s lived in Poland repeatedly for months at a time, adding up to years in total, and Eastern Europe is dear to him. One of his most successful short plays, See Him?, was in the Belarusian Dream Theater: eighteen theaters in thirteen countries simultaneously producing plays to raise awareness about human rights violations in Belarus. He’s been writing plays about Ukraine lately and producing them in evenings of shorts alongside his students’ scripts about, well, everything. His students write about absolutely everything and constantly surprise him.
I guess you might want to know about some of his plays? They include See You in a Minute (a comedic pandemic play set in 2041 that has, you guessed it, puppets!), 18 Months After November (watch it on YouTube!), Hath Taken Away (a lyrical retelling of the Book of Job set in the modern Midwest), In the Shadow of His Language (showing his vexed feelings about academia), Joan’s Laughter (a kick-ass play about Joan of Arc!), and his most-produced shorts, No Winter No Worries (funny), and Saddam’s Lions (not funny). Jacob’s plays have been developed by organizations like Playwrights Horizons, Alliance Theatre, Source Festival, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (for puppets!!), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Chicago Dramatists, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, and Chicago’s DCase. Jacob loves dramaturgs and he’s been lucky enough to work with the likes of Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Heather Helinsky, and Dan Smith. His plays and scholarship have been published by Routledge, Vintage, and a variety of journals. Jacob’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Krakow’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. You can read a bunch of his plays on New Play Exchange, and if you don’t have access to that, contact him through his website and he’ll gladly email you scripts. His website has too many words, but, what can you do? He’s a writer. See for yourself: www.jacobjuntunen.com
If there’s anything else you want to know, shoot him an email with a question, [email protected] and he’ll answer it!
For the past ten years, he’s primarily collaborated with his students at SIU, making theatre out of nothing but a black box with blocks and cubes. More recently he founded Contraband Theatre to use radical hospitality to produce plays that highlight the fly-over region in which he lives. Since 2000, a couple years after he saw a scratchy VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre with mannequins (puppets for adults!!), he’s lived in Poland repeatedly for months at a time, adding up to years in total, and Eastern Europe is dear to him. One of his most successful short plays, See Him?, was in the Belarusian Dream Theater: eighteen theaters in thirteen countries simultaneously producing plays to raise awareness about human rights violations in Belarus. He’s been writing plays about Ukraine lately and producing them in evenings of shorts alongside his students’ scripts about, well, everything. His students write about absolutely everything and constantly surprise him.
I guess you might want to know about some of his plays? They include See You in a Minute (a comedic pandemic play set in 2041 that has, you guessed it, puppets!), 18 Months After November (watch it on YouTube!), Hath Taken Away (a lyrical retelling of the Book of Job set in the modern Midwest), In the Shadow of His Language (showing his vexed feelings about academia), Joan’s Laughter (a kick-ass play about Joan of Arc!), and his most-produced shorts, No Winter No Worries (funny), and Saddam’s Lions (not funny). Jacob’s plays have been developed by organizations like Playwrights Horizons, Alliance Theatre, Source Festival, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (for puppets!!), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Chicago Dramatists, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, and Chicago’s DCase. Jacob loves dramaturgs and he’s been lucky enough to work with the likes of Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Heather Helinsky, and Dan Smith. His plays and scholarship have been published by Routledge, Vintage, and a variety of journals. Jacob’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Krakow’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. You can read a bunch of his plays on New Play Exchange, and if you don’t have access to that, contact him through his website and he’ll gladly email you scripts. His website has too many words, but, what can you do? He’s a writer. See for yourself: www.jacobjuntunen.com
If there’s anything else you want to know, shoot him an email with a question, [email protected] and he’ll answer it!