Interview: Jenny Connell Davis of I WANNA BE A F*CKING PRINCESS at Ground Floor Theatre

Jenny Connell Davis is a playwright, screenwriter, and performer whose work explores identity, justice, and human connection. Her plays, including DRAGON PLAY, SCIENTIFIC METHOD, and END OF SHIFT, have been developed by theaters across the country, from the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference to ACT in Seattle. Also an accomplished screenwriter, her work has been featured at SXSW and the Toronto International Film Festival. Originally from Maine, Jenny now lives and writes in Austin, Texas.

Davis and Ground Floor Theatre have partnered to produce Davis’s I WANNA BE A F*CKING PRINCESS, running May 8-25th at the Ground Floor Theatre’s space on Springdale Rd.

In I WANNA BE A F*CKING PRINCESS Bella’s getting married — and things are about to get wild. Bella and her four bridesmaids are Southern women with big personalities, even bigger secrets, and opinions as strong as their cocktails. The show is a fractured, high-energy fairy tale that turns the idea of "Good Girls" upside down, and asks what it truly means to be good women and good friends.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Jenny Connell Davis to talk about her latest work. We chatted over a cake Davis had in the oven, dove into the inspiration behind the play, women, girls, fairy tales, and what it means to challenge the stories we’ve been told about who we’re supposed to be.

BWW: I'm just so excited to talk to you Jenny. I talked with Lisa Scheps (Co-Artistic Director of Ground Floor Theatre) several months ago about doing a feature for the theatre and she didn’t hesitate to mention this show. I'm a huge fan of the theatre’s mission. Everything they do is important. Tell us about the play, and tell us what happened about the connection, and why you are such a great match for Ground Floor. 

Jenny Connell Davis: This is a play that I developed back when Megan Thornton was at Hyde Park Theater, when they had the playgroup. This was the play that I developed at Hyde Park Theatre. I work in screenwriting, and I just needed a play that would break my screenwriting habits, and my daughter was heading into this super princessy phase, and I was thinking about how important a lot of those old fairy tales had been to me as a kid.

I thought, I’m just going to experiment. And I wrote this play completely out of order. I just wrote this play by hand whenever I could find time, in bits and pieces, and then kind of patchwork quilted it together. Then Megan really connected with it, and as I did a couple of workshops on it I discovered that there was something magical when we worked with women who were a little older. Having them flip into the young roles felt fun and believable and right, because those of us who are a little bit older, we can see 75 from here, and we also can totally remember being 15. I also realized that some of my own cultural assumptions are fundamentally different from a lot of artists fresh out of school. There are certain ways that I relate to having been raised in a female body, that I think are a little different. There was also just something really delightful about getting a group of women together in a room to play. I don't think that we get that many opportunities as women to act alongside a bunch of people of our same age very often and be this playful. It’s a play that's really dark in some places but fundamentally it's a really playful play.

When I started it, I gave some side eye to these fairy tales, because I was looking at my daughter and princess culture can be really conformist. It can be a thing that I'm not about. But then, as I started to dig in I thought, “what did I really learn about these stories subliminally as a kid?”  Oh, I learned a lot of other shit from them, there are really fascinating lessons in them that have some things to teach me now and then. I think these stories will continue to have things to teach me, if I’m paying attention.

I think many of us start out dreaming of being the Princess, and then later, you find out that maybe you're actually the wicked stepmother. And that perhaps it's useful, sometimes, to be the Wolf. Eventually, if you're really lucky, you get to be the fairy godmother. So it's asking what lessons and role models are there for us in these stories, besides the ones that we were thinking about when we first encountered them at the age of six.

The play’s kind of bonkers. It's kind of nonlinear. It does talk about some things like child sexual abuse. It does talk about marriages that fail. We're talking a little about menopause. We're talking about being horny teenagers. It's all of it kind of shot through the lens of women whose characters are initially inspired by a different fairy tale. 

BWW: Why I WANNA BE A F*CKING PRINCESS, now?

Jenny Connell Davis: I started writing the play in 2019. We were in the first Trump administration, and my daughter was a year and a half old. I already had a son, but I was grappling with what it is to raise a daughter. Texas, at least where I live, is very different from where I was raised. Gender performativity has changed since I was a kid growing up in the woods in Maine, and I think we're in a particular political moment where women are under siege. But I think hopefully, this play is about celebration. I will say that the men in this play for the most part don't come off all that well. They are the wolves. You know, they're the handsome princes who sometimes fuck up. You know, they're raised to be charming, not sincere (if you like, Sondheim) and sometimes they're the wolves.

BWW: Is there anything that you would want to say about the play and that nuance of our awareness? 

Jenny Connell Davis: I think it's a play that reminds you that there's no one role that you're stuck in. One of the last lines of the play is that life is about transformation. In some way anything that has to do with magic is about transformation, but so is life, right? And sometimes those transformations are slow and in One Direction. But there’s also a flexibility I think that we need to remind ourselves of, because the alternative is to calcify. I didn't know this play was about that kind of flexibility and transformation until I had written it. All of these roles are available to us at any time, in the same way a kid plays dress up and figures out what hat to wear, but we have to stay open. There's a degree to which sometimes the world requires you to be a certain thing, or play to certain strengths. But there are also times when you get to decide and change your mind and suddenly discover that you're in a different story, a different fairy tale than you thought you were and that's great.

BWW: It is! You're pretty pedigreed as a playwright. Can you tell us if this is an emerging theme? Is it in line with some of the other work you’ve done?

Jenny Connell Davis: I needed to do a play that was a trust fall where I might end up just smacking straight into the cement — where I don't know where I was going before I started. I kind of had an inkling, and I knew there was a need behind the play, but I don't know where it was going. That for me was a really different way to begin a playwriting process. In general,  I really like to play with form and process. I'll be like, “I've never written a two-hander. How do you write a two-hander? I haven't written a farce...and then I'll read all the farces I can find, and figure it out. Different plays asked me to kind of use different muscles. And for me, that's what's fun about it. 

BWW: You spoke to your own creative process, and we know that this brings me to a couple of ideas about the collaboration between you, the director of the show and the actors.

Jenny Connell Davis: I have worked in TV and I have worked in film, where I'm just like, “please write me the check, and then I'll pretend that I'm dead, and you never have to see me again. If you’re lucky as a playwright, for the first production or two, you’re sitting right next to the director, or like three rows back and very involved because you’re still changing the script. 

I feel really lucky because I've usually worked with directors who are pretty great. You don't do new work if you don't like to work with playwrights. If you don't want to work directly with playwrights, there are several thousands of years worth of material you can work from without us.

BWW: What’s up next for you?

Jenny Connell Davis: I have a comedy opening at Penfold Theater next month! It’s called Anton Chekhov IS A TASTY SNACK, and is my answer to all the playwrights who are always adapting Chekhov. And I’m writing a comedy about censorship in a small town Texas library. I am all for using the power of comedy to poke people in the eye. And I’m working to find more productions for a play of mine called THE MESSENGER, that I first wrote for Palm Beach Dramaworks. It's about, what do we teach in school? How do we teach history? And it's about the Holocaust. It's four women, four different decades, all talking somehow about what you say, what don't you say, what can you say? What are you like? Ten years ago, if you'd asked me, I would have said I'm not interested in writing anything political, but I don’t know how you can have lived through the last ten years and not be talking about anything political. I am not going to self censor on stage. Come at me. Yeah.

BWW: What has been your favorite work?

Jenny Connell Davis: Can I pick two?

BWW: Sure.

Jenny Connell Davis: I really love MATINICUS, which is a true story based on a 15 year old girl in Maine. She was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper and one winter, this huge storm blew up that washed their home into the sea. She managed to keep her mother and siblings alive, and kept the lighthouse burning for the next month before her father was able to get back. So that's the monologue play.

And then I'm really excited about Anton Chekhov IS A TASTY SNACKI do think that we need more levity right now, even if we're talking about things that are hard. We need to laugh. I've written tons of plays that I will never tell you about and might burn sometime. But I'm excited about those, yeah.

BWW: What do you want us to take away from I WANNA BE A F*CKING PRINCESS?

Jenny Connell Davis: First, we’ve got a terrific director and baller cast. A great cast. I'm excited. I'm excited to see these women on stage together. Then there's my dream for this: I just want hordes of women to come to this play with their friends and then go party after the show. I hope that this allows a bunch of women to feel seen and gives them an opportunity to celebrate not just where they've been but what lies ahead, no matter where they are in the arc of their life. Then I want them to talk about it. “I recognize that!”  “Oh I’ve totally felt like that!” That would be delightful, I think.

Don't miss this high-octane exploration of female friendship that dares to question everything we've been told about being "good girls" while serving up truth as strong as the cocktails these women pour. It's funny, it's fierce, and it might just change how you think about those fairy tales we've all been sold.

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