When Ana (Gabby Beans) walks from her dormitory to the student center to get some Sour Patch Kids, she is approached by a boy named Jonah (Hagan Oliveras).  Jonah is sweet, respectful, and curious, with a mop for a haircut and an innocent, amiable demeanor.  He is honest about himself and his feelings.  When she asks, he admits he is a virgin, and by the end of their first walk, he says, “I like you,” without any of the fear or insecurity we might expect from a teenager.  But Jonah is more interested in what Ana has to say, and she shares, for example, her sexual fantasies about theatrical romantic gestures.  In one, a rain-soaked man with a sort of Cockney accent shows up at her door to tell her that he didn’t make it to the airport and is in love with her.

Years earlier, Ana lived with an abusive stepfather and a loving but unwell stepbrother, Danny (Samuel H. Levine).  Their relationship is about survival, both physical and emotional, but when they leave home, Ana finds an outlet for her trauma in writing and Danny has nothing.  Years later, Ana is a novelist working on her second book.  At a writer’s retreat, she attracts the attention of Steven (John Zdrojeski), a journalist and former Mormon whose sincere, sunny, and artless presence reminds us of Jonah.  When Ana breaks a lamp, he lunges into action: “I live to dust-bust … It’s satisfying in a way that few things in adult life are.”  Steven has read and loved Ana’s book and he has questions.  They agree on three broad themes: childhood (tentative), her relationship to writing, and her relationship to God.

Rachel Bonds’ Jonah shuffles between these three moments in Ana’s life to trace the course of her trauma and, in part, her recovery.  The unchronological ordering replicates the experience of trauma, and the juxtaposition allows the audience to see how events in the past inform moments in the present.  While the subject is abuse, none of the abusers are embodied onstage.  Even Danny, who does cause a great deal of pain, is never cruel.  There is something humanizing and affirming about Bonds’ focus on goodness.  Jonah and Steven are a type of person we rarely see on stage.  It’s a beautiful and deceptively simple play. 

Jonah runs through March 10th at the Laura Pels Theatre.  111 W. 46th Street  New York, NY.  1 hour 40 minutes.  No intermission.