MERONYMY
by Rachel Jendrzejewski
May 2024
$16
162 pages
7x7 inches
paper/perfect bound
ISBN: 979-8986581408

Context, Homonym, and Polyseme live in a house laden with memories, but Etymology keeps coming with deliveries for Context: a blank book, a doll, a grocery list inked on the back of a loan statement, a conversation with the dentist, a key. Homonym and Polyseme receive the packages. They sort and rearrange; they send what they can to the cloud (via helium balloon); and occasionally they smuggle out old things, lost for years, and new things they know Context will never need. Meanwhile, Context drinks hot water with no tea, plays opera, and tries to figure out if listening is work—if it is labor, if it matters, and if what matters (if it matters) can be retrieved from the ever-accumulating material of living. Meronymy is a kinesthetic, kaleidoscopic, audiovisual performance-portrait of the technologies ancient and modern by which we cling to what we’d otherwise forget. With wry tenderness and formal dexterity, Jendrzejewski builds a space in which to reckon with loss, overflow, and intrusion as integral to the chaotic, cacophonic practice of living in language together.

PRAISE

In this incandescent crystal candy dish of a play, words and phases become objects to be reckoned with, cherished and released. The conversation with your dentist arrives in a box. Later, lists of words layer into a symphonic waterfall of pleasure and grief. Rachel Jendrzejewski daintily deconstructs the legacies of Mac Wellman, Gertrude Stein and Erik Ehn and laces them into her own unique form of, dare I say, musical theater? This play is a pleasure dome for all those who love language in all its loops and contradictions. Warning: you may find yourself googling “what is the difference between synecdoche and metonymy” as a mysterious grin creeps across your face.
- Lisa D’Amour

Rachel Jendrzejewski is toiling with a dream. Nomadic with her parts of speech, she wedges opera between syllables, she gifts readers a laboratory for language. In their making of a home--their reinvention of a home--Meronymy's characters are more like silhouettes. "Grammar" courses its life from adolescence to the aged body and words become trinkets, shedding their syntactical thread. We drift into a tongue-tied universe, a blanket of snow, a flood of lace, where Jendrzejewski greets us as archivist. This is a play for those in transit. This is a play for those trying to remember.
- Lucas Baisch

"Slipping away from your grasp the second you think you've found them, Rachel's words lick out sharp like lace edge, flood in blue and white. A knock at the door of reconciliation, is context everything? This work testifies to the power of making due when language is an elusive love."
- Marcela Michelle

CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Jendrzejewski (she/her) is a writer who frequently collaborates with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists to unpack wide-ranging performative vocabularies. These projects have been developed and/or presented by the Walker Art Center, Red Eye Theater, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Tricklock Company, Los Angeles Performance Practice, The Theatre at the Ace Hotel, Wild Project, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, Rhode Island School of Design, ICA/Boston, and MASS MoCA, among others. She has a long-term collaboration with choreographer Terry Hempfling. Publications include encyclopedia (Spout Press), In Which _______ and Others Discover the End (a collaboration with SuperGroup; Plays Inverse), and Amber (in the anthology I Might Be the Person You Are Talking To; Padua Playwrights). Rachel has a decade+ relationship with Playwrights’ Center, where she’s been honored to receive support as a Jerome Fellow, McKnight Fellow, and Core Writer. She is Co-Artistic Director at Red Eye Theater. M.F.A. Playwriting, Brown University. rachelka.com

Murphy Chang thinks on the structure and malleability of language as material. Her work often takes on a written and/or visual form and has been “shown” both nationally and internationally. Murphy cares little for the boundaries between disciplines. She holds degrees from allegedly reputable institutions and sincerely hopes her work never takes on a publishable form.

Megan & Murray McMillan are multidisciplinary artists who have been collaborating since 2002. Their work is a blend of sculpture, installation, video, performance and photography. They have exhibited at the Casa Masaccio Center for Contemporary Art in Italy, the Kunsthallen Brandts in Denmark, the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece, the National Museum of Art in Bolivia, and the RISD and deCordova Museums. They participated in the 2012 deCordova Biennial, the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. Their work In What Distant Sky was featured in the 2016 MASS MoCA exhibition, Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder. In 2020, their solo exhibition, Some Things We Can Do Together: the Work of Megan and Murray McMillan, a mid-career survey featuring two decades of their collaborative work, traveled from the New Bedford Art Museum to the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA in Portland, Maine. Megan McMillan is a Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Murray McMillan is a Professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. The McMillans have been married since 1997.