Award-Winning Play "The Pool" Returns to NYC for Suicide Awareness Month

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A group of binder-clutching adults greeted me enthusiastically outside the school director Jonathan Andujar, who also teaches middle and high school theatre, had borrowed for rehearsal. The vibe was giddy—cast members tripping over each other to explain the value of their work and how proud they were to be taking it to New York (for a second time!). Inside, Andujar quickly put them to work reblocking the production for their unexpectedly tiny New York stage, including flying two New York-based castmates, drone-like, around the room via laptop Zoom screens. The whole thing felt energetic, excited, maybe a little slapdash, and exceedingly good-natured. Then there was Jennifer.

Jennifer Caress is the playwright and leading lady of this endeavor, an autobiographical work born from her estranged husband’s suicide. Offstage, Caress played with the other actors, her voice matching the fever-pitched intensity of her costars, but onstage was a different matter. Jennifer felt like she was acting in another key. Not discordantly, but in a way that made you feel like you weren’t watching a performance. You were watching a séance; the ghost of Jennifer’s trauma (or the character Jessica’s; the line between the two is difficult to locate) being brought back night after night. Around her, the other actors became ghosts in the summoning, conjuring the people and memories of Jessica’s life while Jennifer seemed to live through them.

There is a strange irony to that nightly revivification. The Pool is ultimately about Jessica’s unshackling from the guilt surrounding her husband’s death and Phillip’s ghost accepting that they must release one another. Caress wrote Jessica an ending in which she can move forward. She has not given herself quite the same ending. “I feel like my guilt is penance,” Caress told me in a Zoom interview a week or so after the rehearsal. “And so I’m never willing to let that go for me. But I gave it to Jessica because I gave her so much of my pain that I wanted to just give her the happy ending that I don’t get.”

This theatre-turned-therapy could have been concerning. Andujar, in fact, had recently encouraged Caress to create more distance between herself and Jessica. “Make it a separate character. Don’t go into yourself to do this. Don’t do that to yourself,” Caress remembered him saying. Her retort was simple: “No, I want to. It’s all part of the process.”

The thing is, despite her newness to theatre, Jennifer never appeared inexpert. “This is the first play I’ve ever written; it’s the first play I’ve ever acted in, so I don’t know how things go,” she told me. “I showed up with, like, a cast. Like, ‘You’re welcome!’” But in the rehearsal room, her grounded energy carried the day. She was an expert in her own grief. Watching her, I felt about as qualified to prescribe the proper way through it as I once did teaching parenting classes before I’d actually had a kid: perhaps there was useful information to offer from outside the experience, but let’s not get confused about who had actually lived it.

Tattooed on Jennifer’s arm are the words “I wrote my way out,” borrowed from Hamilton . When I asked what, exactly, she had written her way out of, Caress told me about a question that had occurred to her after Phillip’s death: “Who are you without his suicide?” The question, she said, “blew my mind.” For so long, his death had been central to the way she understood herself. Writing The Pool meant figuring out what might exist beyond it. It created, she said, “a new Jennifer with the scars and the ashes, but also a new foundation for what to go on.”

She wrote her way out. Then she built a play that lets her go back in.

Crucially, she didn’t go back in alone. Caress didn’t know enough about how theatre was “supposed” to work to know that arriving at the first rehearsal with a cast already assembled was unusual. She simply chose her people. Several members of the company knew one another through improv; others were friends pulled into the orbit through friends. Caress had written an intensely private story and, almost by instinct, populated it with people she trusted.

There is something powerful about that act of casting. Caress gave Dana Kjeldsen her dead husband to play. She gave other friends the therapist’s questions, the concerned friend, the voices that accuse Jessica of abandoning Phillip. People who had existed inside Caress’s experience and memory suddenly belonged, at least partially, to other people. Kjeldsen talked about the impossibility of simply playing Phillip as a “vision.” To perform him, he had to find a whole person with motivations of his own. Caress, meanwhile, remained protective of that complexity. “He was not the bad guy,” she insisted when the cast discussed Phillip. This may be Jennifer’s story, but theatre requires her to let other people live inside it.

And they do. The cast doesn’t behave like a group of people drafted into the service of Caress’s healing. They are funny and invested and enormously proud of the thing they have made together. Kjeldsen put it simply: “This is Jen’s story, but it’s something that’s touched all of us in this cast one way or the other.” Even their concern for Caress comes from inside that shared investment. Producer and cast member Michelle Hoody described watching her at the end of a performance: “By the end of the show, she is wiped out.” Hoody sometimes found herself wondering, “God, is she living this every time she does this?” She couldn’t answer the question. Neither can I. But she is there to see it.

Now they’re taking it back to New York.

The company has already performed The Pool there once, winning Best Production at the Back Door to Broadway Theater Festival. This time they’ll return to the American Theatre of Actors for eight performances. The cast talks about the trip with an infectious mixture of pride and self-mockery. “It’s a block from Broadway,” someone offered during rehearsal. Another dubbed it “off almost Broadway.” “It’s lowercase,” came the correction. Matt Smith , who plays Elliott, has his own favorite brag: “I like to tell my brothers and sisters, because they all have theater degrees, and I don’t.”

And then there are the people waiting on the other side. The timing of the New York run is deliberate: The Pool returns during Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month, and the company talks about reaching suicide-loss survivors as part of the reason for taking the story beyond their own circle. Kjeldsen described that particular kind of grief as isolating: “There’s not a lot about the conversation for suicide loss survivors and those of us that are left here. It’s a very lonely place to be at times.”

That loneliness came up repeatedly in my conversation with the cast. This may be Jennifer’s story, but they understand the act of telling it as a way of making room for other people’s stories, too. Hoody has heard audience members respond with, “I felt seen. I felt heard.” Seeing thoughts they recognized spoken aloud, she said, gives people “this beautiful place to be and feel and grieve.”

Caress feels that exchange from the other side of the footlights. “To actually be standing onstage and listening to someone crying in the audience or hear them laugh when I want them to laugh is—oh, it’s just life-affirming. It’s addicting.”

Caress’s explanation for why she continues to put herself through this is, ultimately, much simpler. “I think it’s honest,” she told me. “And I think that’s where I owe it to the audience to tell the truth. I owe it to the people who maybe have gone through something similar to me to be honest about the thoughts that accompany such happenings.” Some days that honesty means accepting the thought that Phillip’s death was entirely her fault; other days, it means accepting the opposite. “If today it feels like it was entirely my fault, I just own that. If today I feel like it wasn’t my fault at all, I own that.”

I don’t know that there is a neat argument to make about what theatre does with that kind of honesty. I’d be suspicious of anyone who narrowed it down to just one, actually. The Pool hasn’t erased Caress’s guilt; she told me so. Nor can a play make grief uncomplicated simply by putting it in front of other people. But there is something extraordinarily brave in Caress’s willingness to say the ugly, contradictory, sometimes irrational things out loud—to let her friends say them with her, and then to offer them to strangers. If someone in that audience hears a thought they believed belonged only to them and recognizes it coming from the stage, perhaps “I felt seen” is enough.

To help The Pool get to New York, please consider donating here: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/donate-to-support-the- pool

Nominate your favorite local productions and performers before the deadline on October 31, 2026.

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Episode

_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/Feature-THE-POOL-at-MT-Rosa-Productions-And-Hanging-Cow-Productions-At-American-Theatre-Of-Actors-20260916)._