In the first stage directions for All My Sons, Arthur Miller establishes the lead of his 1947 play—the folksy, respected factory owner Joe Keller—as “a man among men.” You can picture the Pulitzer winner ashing his pipe while writing it, and any number of men nodding in recognition as they read it: An all-American salt of the earth type, see?

While the writer Julia May Jonas doesn’t go for the kind of lengthy preamble that Miller used to set the scene, that description guided her riff on Miller’s classic, the cheekily titled A Woman Among Women.

What it might look like for a woman to be considered a pillar of the community, Jonas wondered? Her answer is currently in performance at Lincoln Center Theater after a well-received premiere at the Bushwick Starr in 2024.

Woman is the first in a five-play cycle reimagining landmarks of the American canon, developed in part with the director Sarah Catherine Hughes. The series, collectively titled All Long True American Stories, also tackles Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Sam Shepard’s True West, David Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. “You do one, who cares?” Jonas deadpans. “But if you do five, you’re trying to really discover something.”

As Hughes explains, the project is intended to be additive to the canon, neither takedown nor translation. Jonas arrived at these plays intuitively; they were the first five she thought of, and her responses were an amalgamation of what first came to mind when thinking of them and what she was already interested in doing, artistically (and some irreverence). Her take on Long Day’s Journey, for example, We Used To Wear Bonnets & Get High All The Time, is not so much about one family’s evening at home, but about a century’s worth of generations who have occupied the same house.

Still, the space those source plays occupy is inescapable. Jonas recalls browsing Powell’s Books, a large independent shop in Portland, Oregon, and noticing its drama section pretty much only included these writers’ works. It mostly plays out the same in actual theaters: In 2020, as Hughes and Jonas were preparing to begin rolling out the cycle at the Starr, before the pandemic derailed their plans, each entry’s inspiration had received major New York revivals within a year.

But enough about the past. Joe Keller’s come and gone, and Jonas has given us Cleo, a sixty-something therapist who runs a women’s wellness center in Northampton, MA. Though preserving Miller’s central themes of truth and personal responsibility—can a pillar of the community turn into a pillar of salt?—the drama shifts from a post-war story about the sale of faulty aircraft parts to explore dynamics of care (self and communal) among women. Cleo’s daughter, Jo, was involved in an altercation that landed her in jail. As the play progresses, details emerge about the factors which may have contributed to Jo’s aggression, echoing themes of nature versus nurture—and the intersection with mental illness, medication, and agency.

Raising children, and what Hughes calls, “all that domestic labor that has been typically considered not that important,” become the play’s main concern, as the community contemplates their role in Jo’s troubled upbringing. For Hughes, “to know your neighbors and talk to them, and be ready to help them, feels very feminine.” So to simply re-gender Miller’s protagonist and present a female wartime factory boss, Jonas echoes, “already, that’s fake to me.” A female therapist in a small town known for its women’s college, Smith, felt more authentic to the playwright.

“We say we have strong female characters and yet, in a way, put them in drag: You’re strong because you’re taking on historically masculine roles and jobs,” the playwright continues. “I wanted to write about common female situations to talk about, not feminism, but what femininity looks like inside different kinds of structures.”

Realism, as a theatrical concept, and what’s real for the audience member are top of mind here. Miller adhered to linear narratives and precise directions to create fluid, recognizable situations. But Jonas has a healthy awareness that she’s never going to trick her audience into thinking her actors are real people. She is more interested in engaging the medium’s underplayed reality: that people are gathered to share a story in real time. No one will be singled out in any of her plays, so the spotlight-averse can rest easy, though this one does encourage some forms of participation. Inspired by the co-op rec room in which she and Hughes developed the play, where chairs and bingo tables had to be shoved to the side, Woman is meant to be performed amidst an audience seated concentrically. Actors move through a space designed to feel like Cleo’s backyard, turning everyone into neighbors.

It’s an invitation into the play’s community that’s both casual and conspiratorial. As tensions rise, Jonas and Hughes break open the fabric of the play. Suddenly, characters who, minutes ago, were singing and cracking jokes right beside you become distant; neighbors starting to look at each other differently. “It’s this feeling of complicity because you weren’t just watching, you were part of it and have some ownership over what’s going on,” Hughes says, evoking the stomach-churning inevitability of Greek tragedy. “Now you have to watch it and it’s been taken from you.”

Subverting expectations seems to come easily to Jonas, who this year adapted her debut novel, Vladimir, into a series for Netflix. (She was also the executive producer and showrunner.) Her time as a professor of theater at Skidmore College informed the racy tale of on-campus obsession, narrated by a deliciously unreliable antiheroine partly inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita. In the midst of this run of canonical inversions, Jonas cautions against typecasting: “It’s not like I’m the lady who does these things.” Her next novel, Diana, out next spring, revisits some of her pet themes, following an actress who moves back home with her family to grapple with her mental health.

“When I’m trying to understand something, I’m bouncing off of things I’ve consumed as a way of finding my writerly argument,” she continues. “I’m kind of an art monster, I interpret my world through art.”