Meet Jennifer and Bob. They’re the Joneses. Meet Pony and John. They’re also the Joneses. They’re next door neighbors. Keeping up with them can feel awfully familiar in this hilarious and humane look at how we live. Literate and slyly hilarious, this award-winning play dives deep below the surface with probing grace.
Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses opened on Broadway in 2014, where it won a Drama Desk Award, was named USA Today’s “Best Play on Broadway,” topped the Guardian’s 2014 list of best American plays, and was included in the New York Times’ “Best Theater of 2014.” We are deeply proud to be sharing it with Portland audiences. The show is an unconventional, unexpected, original and outrageous look at the people who live next door and the truths we think we know. The show is funny and banal and profound and intimate. Eno’s voice is one of the most singular of his generation.
I hope with all of these four characters, who have very different responses to the big, big things in life – I hope that people find one or the other or the other or the other of them or some mix of them to be something that’s very recognizable to how they go through their day and their lives.Will Eno
To be able to hear the play and be part of the play is transforming for me as a human being… I have the exquisite pleasure of standing backstage and hearing something that is cracking me up and changing my perspective on life… It comes so organically out of [Eno’s] heart and soul, that ineffable something, that always gets you in the stomach.Marissa Tomei (who starred in the show on Broadway)
Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as The Realistic Joneses, by Will Eno, do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really… [the show] brought me a pleasurable rush virtually unmatched by anything I’ve seen this season.Charles Isherwood, The New York Times