Grim Topics Confronted in 'The Mason Jar'

The audience at Merion Friends Meeting probably had just a vague idea of what to expect Sunday evening when radio host Mannwell Glenn introduced a staged reading of the new play “The Mason Jar.”

“This isn’t Madea’s ‘The Mason Jar.’ This isn’t David E. Talbert Presents ‘The Mason Jar,’” he said. “This is sophistication.”

Mona R. Washington’s play hit heavily on some themes so disturbing that at times the crowd of about 60 laughed nervously.

“I’m kind of getting used to it,” said Washington, who sees “The Mason Jar” as a tragedy. “In all my plays there’s nervous laughter. So that was a good thing… It meant that I was on track.”

The play centers around a white Main Line family who are forced to confront their personal troubles when the 12-year-old son makes a grim discovery: A photograph of his smiling grandfather with a lynch mob, along with a jar containing the victim’s severed finger.

What follows is a weave of argument, guilt and bewilderment as the family tries to resolve their issues with the grandfather, who seems to feel horrible about the event that took place when he was 15, during a “different time.”

Kim Richardson of Germantown came to the reading through the recommendation of a friend. She noticed that the play doesn’t have a hero—that each character is flawed in some way, which she thinks is true to life.

“One of the things you find is everybody’s sort of in their own glass house,” Richardson said. “When one person points out the follies of another person, we see each person has issues of their own. We’re all human. We all have frailties. We all make mistakes.”

Some viewers, such as Eileen Carpenter, thought the two kids could be seen as the moral voice under all the confusion, even if they were far removed from the concept of violent racism.

“The kids weren’t afraid to stay on top and keep asking questions,” said Carpenter, a member of Merion Friends Meeting. “They didn’t start getting uncomfortable and change the topic the way the adults did.”

The fact that the play deals with these topics using an all-white cast has raised a few eyebrows, Washington said. People have even encouraged her to add a black character, but she thinks that would miss the point.

“I like to talk much more about racism rather than race,” she said after the performance. “And I say that because you can have a roomful of white people and talk about racism—you don’t need black people to talk about racism. It’s an ideology.” 

She added that the same idea applies to discussing anti-Semitism and homophobia, subjects that don’t necessitate participation from Jewish or gay people.

After the performance, University of Pennsylvania Professor Herman Beavers, attorney Michael Coard and Washington’s agent Sid Holmes joined the cast onstage. They engaged the audience in a discussion moderated by Glenn that shifted through a variety of topics such as violent video games, reparations, jokes about the birther movement and the etymology of racial slurs.

Although the play revolves around racism, one of its underlying themes seems to be the excuses individuals come up with to justify apathy toward a wrongdoing—however big or small. For instance, when Washington weighed in on the discussion, she mentioned the guilt she feels for not sticking up for a classmate who was bullied when they were kids.

Nathaniel Brastow, who read the part of 12-year-old Luke Winnett, reflected on his own experiences with apathy, when he mentioned an anti-bullying program in his health class.

“I never realized how bad it was. And after health I just brushed it away and talked with my friends like nothing ever happened,” he said. “But that’s not what you have to do. You have to do something about it.”

Full productions of “The Mason Jar” are in the works as Washington, a lawyer, continues with other creative endeavors.

Washington, who is from New Jersey, is familiar with the Main Line area from visiting family in Devon. She frequently strings together fluid, verbal elaborations about racism, sexism, cavalier fantasy violence and negativity, which seem to worry her a great deal, though she seems generally upbeat.

“I just don’t know what the alternative is to not worrying,” she said.