An undergraduate student, in the holds of Boston, embarked on an assigned visit to Siti Companies touring production at Harvard. They were staging a production of an experimental new play, dreamed up and produced by playwriting visionary, Charles Mee, and this student was sent to observe and take notes.

The undergraduate student in question was a young Brennan Roach, now our theater director. He was in a Theater and Aesthetics lecture class in his first year away from home, unsure of what he was about to see at a college he didn’t even attend. But when Roach walked out of the theater, he just couldn’t repress his delight for the performance he saw.

“I’d never seen anything like it before, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. A lot of my classmates felt the same way,” said Roach.

The performance was bobrauschenbergamerica. And this would be far from the last time Roach would interact with this piece.

“I saw a different production of [bobrauschenbergamerica] produced ten years ago at the same program that I teach at in the summer,” said Roach. “So I had that in my back pocket, and it’s kind of been sitting on my desk for years, waiting for the right time and the right place.”

And so, bobrauschenbergamerica waited. It waited through esteemed productions of Radium Girls in 2022, Ghost Bike in 2023 and Puffs in 2024. But it had a place in the classroom the whole time.

“I started to bring it in with production class. We engage with various scripts throughout the year, and I’ve brought this one out a couple times because it’s so different,” said Roach.

And despite bobrauschenbergamerica’s longstanding presence in the classroom, it just fell past the Jones theater team when picking plays to stage in the fall season. That was until Roach embarked on another journey, this time unassigned.

“The script was on my mind. This summer, I had a short window to take a little vacation, and we went up to the driftless area of Wisconsin… it was on the drive back from that area, it was really nostalgic in a way. I was thinking about how beautiful that felt. It made me wistful for the spirit of a place that is so beautiful,” said Roach.

And through that nostalgia, Roach felt a reminder of a play that hit on those notes of beauty and wist.

“[bobrauschenbergamerica] was just something that gave me a lot of delight,” said Roach. “And my gut when I first picked up this show and decided to do it was in this concept of the things that bring you delight.”

Through that delight, however, there comes a great challenge and dedication required for any individual involved.

“I wanted to embrace [bobrauschenbergamerica] by really going in and having quality time to just sit and talk with every single stakeholder, every single person playing a character and unpack and ask about what they were seeing in the script,” said Roach.

Those stakeholders come together, making up the difference within the delight for Roach as so many unique parts come together.

“No one world is like another, and no one America, or in this case, bobrauschenbergamerica, is gonna be like another,” said Roach. “The story that I’m telling about the story of other people is that they’re experiencing the story that they created.”

A play with so much delight and difference riding on its back will inevitably be difficult to produce, but Roach looks at Jones at the right place for that difference to take place.

“One of the reasons I said yes to this was because we’re able to reach high and achieve great things from a standpoint of academic rigor, and I figured why not go after something that’s in that category as well,” said Roach. “In a lot of ways, this is the theater response to what we’re capable of.”