Morgan Jenness, a dramaturg, teacher and theatrical agent who nurtured the work of countless playwrights — including Taylor Mac, David Adjmi, David Henry Hwang, Larry Kramer and Maria Irene Fornés — died on Nov. 12. Ms. Jenness, who in recent years began using the pronouns they/them and she interchangeably, was 72.
Mx. Mac confirmed the death. “In Act 3 of her life, she was exploring her gender identity,” said Mx. Mac, who went to Ms. Jenness’s apartment in the East Village of Manhattan with two friends after she failed to show up for a class she taught at Columbia University and discovered her body. The cause of death had not yet been determined.
Ms. Jenness was a revered and beloved figure in the theater community — particularly the downtown theater community. (In many ways, she was its embodiment.) She had a deep moral seriousness, colleagues said, as well as a fierce artistic integrity and a passion for subversive work that had depth charges in all the right places. She also had “a complete indifference to material success,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, where Ms. Jenness began her career. “She was frankly repelled by it.”
The play was the thing.
“She would ask writers, ‘What do you want to inject into the bloodstream of the American theater?’” recalled Beth Blickers, a theatrical agent.
“If you said, ‘I just want to tell good stories,’ she would turn to me and say, ‘That was a terrible answer,’” Ms. Blickers continued. “She wanted someone to say, ‘I have a passion for this community or this idea.’ To tell good stories wasn’t enough.”
A dramaturg has been defined as a sort of literary and theatrical adviser who helps the actors and director understand the play they’re presenting. “But that was the European model, focused primarily on the classics,” Mr. Eustis said. “Morgan was one of the first generation of people who were defining what a new play dramaturg was: the midwife and support system of a playwright.”
That support, coupled with Ms. Jenness’s expansive artistic vision, had a trickle-down effect, said Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, a nonprofit Off Broadway theater. “Even writers who never interacted with Morgan, who never worked with her, were probably impacted by her radical, sly thinking,” he said.
“Without Morgan, we wouldn’t have Len Jenkin,” Mr. Greenfield continued, referring to the Obie Award-winning author of multiple plays, including “Limbo Tales” and “The Death and Life of Jesse James.” “And without Len, we wouldn’t have the plasticity of the work of Sarah Ruhl and Dan LeFranc.”
Mr. Adjmi, the author of the 2024 Tony Award-winning play “Stereophonic,” met Ms. Jenness when he was a graduate student at the University of Iowa and she was a guest at a theater festival there. Later, she worked with him on the plays “Stunning,” which ran at LCT3, the Lincoln Center Theater program for emerging artists, in 2009, and “Marie Antoinette,” produced at Yale Repertory Theater in 2012.
“I think Morgan was attracted to people who were kind of feral and pushing against the status quo, but didn’t know how to navigate life or the world of theater,” Mr. Adjmi said. “She would mentor us. Her dramaturgy was gentle and profound; the questions she asked were so pointed and reverberant that I ask myself those same questions now.”
Ms. Jenness was born Heidemarie Schmiege on Aug. 23, 1952, in Giessen, Germany. Her mother, Anna (Pfeiff) Schmiege, a domestic worker, and her father, Hans Karl Friedrich Schmiege, a coppersmith, divorced soon after.
Ms. Schmiege brought her infant daughter along to her job as a maid for Fritjof Jonassen, the director of the local United States Information Center, and his wife, Andreina, became very attached to the little girl. When Mr. Jonassen was posted to Washington, the couple, who had no children, asked to adopt the 3½-year-old Heidemarie.
At first, Ms. Schmiege said no. But she had recently given birth to a son, Henryk Konhaeuser, had little money and next to no expectation of marrying the father. Finally, she agreed to the plan, after the Jonassens promised to stay in touch. “But that didn’t happen,” said Mr. Konhaeuser, who reconnected with his sister when they were adults.
Heidemarie had a troubled relationship with her adoptive father. But it was Mr. Jonassen who introduced her to theater, bringing home Broadway cast albums and buying tickets to local productions of Shakespeare. In high school, she became a mainstay of the drama department.
When she was 13, her adoptive mother died, and things got worse at home. For a time, she lived in a halfway house.
Midway through her sophomore year at Kent State University, she left, moving to New York and taking a new name: Morgan, a nod to the ambiguous enchantress from the Arthurian legend. “To her, it conjured a magical shape-shifter,” said Maxinne Rhea Leighton, a writer who was a close friend. But like others in Ms. Jenness’s circle, Ms. Leighton had no idea what inspired the new surname.
“I guess it’s a mystery that will die with her, which is something she would very much enjoy,” Ms. Blickers said.
Temp work paid the bills and, in very circuitous fashion, introduced Ms. Jenness to Lynn Holst, a script consultant who was then a program director at the Public Theater. Ms. Jenness interned there in 1979 and joined the staff in the early 1980s, working in a range of roles, including literary manager and director of play development.
Later, she served as dramaturg at New York Theater Workshop, The Mark Taper Forum and Hartford Stage; taught in theater programs at Brown University, New York University, Fordham University, Columbia University and Pace University; and, for several years, worked as a theatrical agent.
“She hated it,” said Mx. Mac, who described Ms. Jenness as a surrogate mother. “But she loved having an expense account so she could take everyone to lunch.”
The needs of anxious playwrights notwithstanding, Ms. Jenness devoted large swaths of time to matters wholly unrelated to the theater. She was a puppet maker and puppeteer, a singer and, notably, an activist for progressive causes, including Sane Energy Project, a grass-roots organization promoting renewable energy.
“She was a person whose life was dedicated to showing up,” Mx. Mac said. “Every planning meeting, every protest, every march.”
But Ms. Jenness became a target of protest herself in 2016, when a Black student in one of her classes at Fordham University received what he considered a “racially charged” response after requesting an extension on an assignment.
“It is really disappointing to see you fall into a stereotype narrative the dominant society expects. You are better than this,” wrote Ms. Jenness in an email response that the student posted on social media. It was picked up by Gothamist and Patch, among other outlets.
She apologized in a statement, saying, “I learned that even for someone with my extensive history of activism and championship of diverse voices in the theater, I am not immune to a bad case of E.W.L.A.P.A. — Entitled White Liberal Assumptive/Presumptive Arrogance.”
In addition to her brother, Ms. Jenness is survived by four nephews and two nieces. One of those nieces, Martinique Gann, came to New York for a three-month visit in 2008.
“There was no stopping my aunt for anything,” Ms. Gann recalled. “She picked me up in a cab from the airport. And right away, with my two suitcases, we drove straight to Fordham University to see a play one of her students had written.”
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