In his science-project-cum-tragicomic-play, The Reservoir, Jake Brasch puts the arc of self-possession on stage. His young adult protagonist, Josh, wakes up flat on his back in Denver, his hometown, not remembering how he got there or whether he was still enrolled in college in New York. Over the next several months (or two hours), Josh gathers his body and mind while reconnecting with his four grandparents. As he convalesces and coalescences, his elders progress into Alzheimer’s, losing their mental and physical faculties.
How do we relearn the story of ourselves, just as we relearn the stories of the ever-changing people who walk alongside us? The show begs the question, at every bend and bender.
Jake, a sober playwright from Denver, used details from his own addiction recovery to write The Reservoir, but he was quick to note that the play is much more autobiographical in the emotions it portrays than the details of the narrative. That emotional offering is a generous one, and Jake gives it artfully. “I would tell you anything,” he said to me during our interview. Meaning me as me, but also me as you, as us, as his audience. And I believe that he would, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also a master of his craft, always a step ahead with a joke to tune a tender moment. A good chef knows when you need to add acid to make the dish sing.
The Reservoir is a recovery meeting, and Jake is our sponsor. He is guiding the story as it takes shape between audience and performers, helping us see the possibilities as clearly as the tragedies, making us laugh as much as we cry.
How fitting that when I connected with him for a conversation about how he handled this emotionally vast material, he was leaving a rehearsal for HOLE!, a musical comedy he co-created with Nadja Leonhard-Hooper about a butt plug cult in Nebraska.
This conversation has been edited for both length and clarity.
Givens Parr: The play had its first run in Denver, which is where you grew up. It then ran in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Berkeley, and now it’s having an off-Broadway run in New York, where you have your adult life and professional base. Have these locations themselves and your relationships with them illuminated different things about the work?
Jake Brasch: Most certainly. The play has landed differently in each of the five cities it’s played in over the last year.
Denver was fascinating and a little cursed. It’s a small town, and many of the patrons had some association with my actual grandparents, who feature prominently in this semi-autobiographical play about my alcoholism. I got a million emails like, your grandma and I used to do swim class at the JCC together! I’d be sitting through a preview and my third-grade teacher would show up to tell me how glad she was that I got sober. It was shocking for me, but also thrilling to see people feel so personally connected to a play that has Denver in its DNA.
In Atlanta, audiences really empathized with the evangelical, conservative grandparents, which I found fascinating. It gave those characters a kind of justice that felt complicated but meaningful. In Berkeley and L.A., the West Coast Jewry really connected with the lefty paternal grandparents.
Here in New York, there have been a lot of theater people seeing the play. I don’t say that disparagingly. This is a play with a direct-address protagonist, some theatrical references, and a lot of formal playfulness, and it’s been exciting to feel those elements really land with people who are themselves in the weeds of theater.
But something I found very moving about working in “the regions,” as they say, is that the people going to the theater are generally not people who make art. They’re subscribers, school groups, people who come with friends. You get a broader swath of the public. I wish it were broader still.
This year has been a crash course not only in how a play is received differently in different cities, but how it changes from theater to theater—with different productions, different casts, and different rooms, especially with a piece that walks such a fine tonal tightrope between Borscht Belt comedy and crushing tragedy. It’s been fascinating and humbling to see how deeply theater is a collaborative art form. The play really shifts depending on the company making it.
GP: I would love to talk more about the physicality of the play. You have worked as a clown and that you teach Grotowski’s methods. I was wondering how that informs how you write and tell stories—this one, and more generally.
Jake Brasch: I started as a performer. When I began writing, I thought, there are so many things I want to do. I want to sing. I want to write music. I want to move. I want to make movement part of the storytelling. I want to devise theater. Eventually I realized that the way I write plays actually smashes all of those impulses together—if not always in the final product, then very much in the process. I use a lot of movement as a way to generate and develop the work.
The Reservoir is deeply physical. I joke that it’s a two-hour movement piece for four senior citizens and a twink.
The grandparents in the play inhabit Josh’s brain space. He uses them almost like a Greek chorus to understand himself. Gradually, over the course of the play, he begins to see them not as projections or symbols but as their own full, complex, beautiful selves.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write a play in which older actors could play thorny, horny, complicated, and physically demanding roles.
GP: You seem to write more material for proportionally older casts than other playwrights your age. And, as you said, not just in a way that includes older voices, but that relies on the actual vitality and complexity of these characters to drive the storytelling.
In collaborating with older actors, do you feel like you’re tapping into the age-old-phenomenon of learning from elder storytellers in the community? How does having these professionals and people who have simply lived more and spent more time telling stories inside and outside of the theater shape the work you’re doing?
JB: I cannot tell you what a joy it has been to be in five processes with older actors this year. The stories in the room are unbelievable. In the New York production alone, we have four actors who have each had fifty-plus-year careers. I couldn’t leave the rehearsal room for lunch because I had to hear all the hot gossip about Stephen Sondheim or Mike Nichols.
There’s really no way of working on this play where the room doesn’t become the play. The four grandparents have to essentially help this young actor figure out how to give the biggest performance anyone ever has to give on stage. He never leaves the stage. It’s acrobatic. It’s insane. And then he’s helping them with things like getting up the stairs.
That mutually beneficial relationship between older and younger actors—that is the play. Doing the play practically requires that dynamic to develop inside the company. And every group that has worked on it has come to really love each other.
Intergenerational connection is something we get far too little of in our culture, and it’s deeply healing.
GP: I agree. I think that a lot of people are experiencing a kind of poverty of intergenerationality and the ecosystem of love and learning and storytelling that it can be, as well as the mutual physical support it often involves. Those relationships give us perspective on our offerings over a life, what we can give each other and how those things change.
There were a few moments in the play that struck me as almost didactic in that regard. To me, they felt like earned, but still surprising choices. The instructive tenderness was almost ironically edgy, potentially unfashionable for a certain New York corner.
For example, at one point Josh is re-meeting a grandparent in a changed state, and another grandparent, as a voice in his mind, gives Josh advice, because he doesn’t know how to show care in the way that the changed grandparent actually needs.
How intentional was that, and what have people’s responses been to those moments?
JB: This is a play I wrote in 2019, so in some ways I feel a little like an archaeologist excavating my own work. But something I’ve learned about the play over time is to trust its earnestness.
Bringing it through New York made me nervous for that reason. There’s a lot of theater right now that works through withholding—where meaning is slowly assembled and audiences are invited to interpret the silences. I love that mode of theater. But this play isn’t really doing that. These characters wear their hearts on their sleeves. They process the world out loud. There’s less subtext than people might be used to, because the protagonist is actively trying to understand what’s happening to him in real time.
That’s also just who I am. I process through language. I tend to say what I mean. There isn’t a hidden, more mysterious version of me behind the curtain—I’m usually telling you exactly what I’m thinking, for better or worse. And Josh works the same way. He’s trying to understand the lesson, trying to figure out how to take care of people, trying to figure out how to live better.
The play absolutely has haters, which I actually find fascinating. Everything does. But a lot of the resistance tends to be to what people perceive as the “self-help language” of AA. That language can feel sentimental or gooey to some people.
And I get that reaction. When I first got sober, I had the same resistance. The slogans and clichés—“let go,” “one day at a time”—felt simplistic to me. But the strange thing is that once I surrendered to them, they became incredibly useful. They reduce something that feels overwhelmingly complex into a simple aspiration you can actually act on.
So I’ve come to trust those moments in the play—the ones that are obvious, or sentimental, or instructive—because those are actually the emotional registers families often inhabit with each other, especially across generations. With grandparents there’s usually some distance, but also incredible tenderness. You’re meeting each other at strange points on the arc of life: one person just beginning to form themselves, the other looking back and asking what it all meant.
Those are very vulnerable encounters. And the play leans into that.
GP: When I read and watch your plays, I feel that trust of these elemental, deeply human things and the generosity it takes to feel feelings in public and also trust that other people have these experiences. We all want to be witnessed, to be held in our complexity, and the chance to participate unapologetically in that in the theater is moving.
Which brings me to a question about the inverse phenomenon: What is your perspective on the compulsion to hide part of oneself? How does that show up in addition and in recovery, and what is the relationship between that and telling stories with real freedom as an artist?
JB: The question underneath that is really: What does it mean to put yourself on stage?
In truth, there’s more distance between me and the character than people might think. The Reservoir comes out of a time in my life that I remember more emotionally than factually. I remember the feelings much more clearly than the exact events.
Archetypically those are my grandparents. Archetypically that’s a version of me. But many of the details are invented or rearranged. Interestingly, the autobiographical parts are often not the ones people assume.
At the same time, I do feel complicated about putting myself on stage. There’s always a little voice asking: Who do you think you are? Why should anyone care about your story? When you foreground yourself in a piece, some people inevitably react with suspicion.
Ironically, I didn’t start with autobiography as the goal. I stumbled into this play through the science—I was interested in the overlap between addiction and Alzheimer’s. But once I realized how personal the subject matter was going to be for audiences, I felt strongly that I needed to write from experience.
I didn’t want to write a thesis about addiction or Alzheimer’s. I wanted to be very clear: This is not a universal statement. This is simply what happened to me.
And honestly, if I were starting the play now, I might not write it the same way. It’s been intense to spend the last year publicly standing next to a piece that re-enacts my alcoholism and my grandparents’ deaths every night. There are moments when I feel almost embarrassed by the “me-ness” of it.
But every play is autobiographical in some way. Nobody is writing something that isn’t filtered through their own experience. The only difference is how much you reveal and how much you hide. Some playwrights take comfort in the audience not knowing where the personal material lives.
This play exists in a very particular emotional window for me. I had just enough distance from the experience to shape it into art, but I still felt it intensely enough that I had to write it.
GP: I think a lot about theater as an inherently localized, ephemeral form. Ultimately, a play is not being played for an algorithm but for a room full of people, where an essential question is present. That is, what can these bodies conveying these stories offer these specific people?
When you were starting out in recovery and you were taking in and participating in that as its own kind of theater of people talking about their experiences, were there also formal works of theater or art that broadened your imagination around your own story? Do you believe that theater serves that?
JB: When I first got sober, I was terrified that humor—the only currency I really care about, for better or for worse—was going to disappear. Instead, the opposite happened. Recovery actually gave me my project, which is to write comedies about things that aren’t funny.
In terms of art that resonated with me early on, BoJack Horseman weirdly meant a lot to me. It captured the internal experience of addiction in a way that felt very true—the absurdity and the sadness living right next to each other. More broadly, I found myself drawn to work that makes you ask: Why am I laughing right now? Why am I crying? Because those experiences are actually very close to each other.
Chris Durang does that beautifully. David Lindsay-Abaire does it. Robert O’Hara does it. Annie Baker does it. They lure you in with humor and then suddenly you realize you’re holding something very serious.
Kimberly Akimbo is a great example. By the end of that show you’re watching a 70-year-old woman kiss an 18-year-old boy, and you’re completely on board, because the storytelling has transported you so thoroughly. Humor opens the door, and then the play is able to give you something much deeper.
Those are the tricks I love.
Also the most inspiring theatre I’ve ever seen is in recovery meetings.
The storytelling is incredible. We heal through our stories; they’re our medicine. They’re deeply funny, often bleak, always brutally honest. People are standing up and talking about the worst things that have ever happened to them, and they’re doing it with a kind of timing and rhythm that would make any playwright jealous.
There’s something profoundly dramatic and deeply life-affirming about watching someone try to understand their own life out loud in front of strangers.
GP: Can you say more about the life-affirming aspects of that?
JB: I guess the most life-affirming part is watching people become their raw, vulnerable, full selves.
You see someone walk into a room as a shell of themselves and you watch them become something beyond their wildest dreams.
I’m so grateful to be a part of a community that gives people a structure for becoming themselves.
GP: Do you think that the communal witnessing is the foundation of that?
JB: Yes. It’s very hard to see transformation in yourself, but you can see it very clearly in someone else.
In recovery rooms, you watch people slowly get better. And because recovery is messy—people come in and out, relapse, disappear, come back—when it actually sticks, it feels miraculous. Nobody can fully explain why it works for some people when it does. So when you see someone really start to change, the whole room feels it.
GP: Do you ever feel struck by your own powers? When you’re holding an audience in your hand and you’re able to make bleak things funny, does the access point come with a sense of moral or even spiritual responsibility? Or do you see that as beyond the scope of your vocation as a storyteller?
JB: I actually understand that dynamic more clearly in my life as a sponsor than I do as a writer.
As a sponsor, you’re often helping someone see that engaging with difficult truths isn’t a sacrifice—it’s the path toward relief.
As a writer, the sensation is slightly different. There’s a moment in the theater sometimes when the audience doesn’t yet know what’s coming, but you do. That’s a very particular thrill.
At the end of The Reservoir there’s a moment that leans extremely sentimental—and then immediately undercuts itself with a joke. I’m very proud of those moments. They feel like what it feels like to be me: earnest emotion followed immediately by humor.
When audiences respond to that rhythm, I feel very seen.
And yes, I do feel some responsibility to make funny things right now. The world is bleak. So yes—funny things about serious subjects. But also just funny things.
I do feel I have a civic responsibility to be funny when everything feels like hell. I don’t know how to do a lot of things that other people seem to nail intuitively, but I know how to be funny.
One of the projects I’m working on right now is a musical about butt plugs. It’s secretly about queer safety and love, but it’s also extremely stupid. Deeply stupid fun.
GP: I also want to ask about your collaboration with Shelley Butler, the director of the Atlantic run of The Reservoir, who has directed several of the previous productions as well. Is there anything that she brought out of the play that you didn’t expect?
JB: Shelley Butler and I have a kind of shorthand that’s very rare.
The amazing thing is that we tend to see the same thing instinctively. Often in rehearsal we can just look at each other and immediately know whether something is working.
With other directors I’ve loved, the process can sometimes be more interpretive—where I show them what I’m imagining, they bring their own vision, and we negotiate between those perspectives. That can be really productive.
But with Shelley there’s a deeper alignment of taste. She understands the humor and the heart of the piece in the same way I do, which is especially important when you’re trying to walk a very delicate tonal line. When Shelley says, “I don’t understand this. Explain it to me.” Most of the time I can’t. And then we have to go back and figure it out together, which I love.
GP: You dedicated the play to “Grandma B” and to people on the recovery journey, and I was wondering if you wanted to share a word about Grandma B and something that she loved or that you learned from her.
JB: My grandmother was the most endlessly curious person I’ve ever known. She believed deeply in engaging with the arts for their own sake.
She was a mathematician and an electrical engineer. Her professional life had nothing to do with the arts, but she believed you go to the symphony. You go to museums. You go to the theater. You go to the opera. You go to chamber music. It’s simply part of being alive.
And because I had old-lady interests by the time I was about four—I like to say I was born a forty-year-old gay man—she took me along for everything. And she never catered to me.
When I was seven she took me to London. I told her I wanted to see Annie, and she said, We are going to a Bernard Shaw play.
The Reservoir is partly about whether anything can protect us from memory loss—dementia, Alzheimer’s—and my grandmother did all the recommended brain-healthy things. But she didn’t do them out of fear. She did them because she had an enormous appetite for life.
In the end, that’s all you can do. That’s true in recovery and it’s true in life. There’s so much we can’t control. The only thing we can control is whether we stay engaged with the human experience or run away from it.
For her, curiosity and art were as necessary as water. That’s what I think about when I think about her.
GP: That makes me think of an aspect of The Reservoir that I found both beautiful and painful to watch. Josh, this young character, starts out with his body-mind-spirit very separate, sort of swirling around him. His memories and experiences and intentions are all untethered, and, over the course of the play, we watch those cohere and settle inside him as he finds a kind of freedom. At the same time, he’s moving through these relationships with his grandparents, who are, in a different way, at a different time of life, progressing toward a separation of personality and their body. And those phenomena happening together beg a core question that, in this story, feels both generous and at times cruel: What is freedom in ourselves, and in our relationships with each other, and how can we accompany each other toward those freedoms?
JB: Yes—that’s exactly the tension the play lives inside.
At its core, the play is about the boundary between what we can control and what we can’t. Which brings us right back to the serenity prayer: The power to change the things we can, the acceptance of the things we can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This play is about the wisdom to know the difference—about trying to understand what is knowable and what isn’t, and about loving people fiercely inside the limits of what we can control.
There’s a lot of heartbreak in that realization. But there’s also a lot of humor. And the play lives in the space between those two things.
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