Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
Symbolism! Lore! Creation!
Around this time last year I started noticing rabbits everywhere. I documented the occurrences on my phone. I even made a new friend who played a character named Bunny on a TV show and voiced an animated rabbit (Rabbit, Rabbit!?). Somehow, rabbits made their way into the play I developed in Clubbed Thumb’s writers group, and the rabbit sightings haven’t stopped. I finally picked up a book about the history of rabbits and met a rabbit IRL for the first time (Thank you, Sophie McIntosh).
To me, rabbits signify childhood and nostalgia. As I’m writing this on my bed, I’m flanked by my rabbit stuffed animal who is as old as I am and still shares a bed with me. My parents read The Velveteen Rabbit to me over and over as a child, and when my stuffed rabbit would tear, they put the book on audio while my mom mended her with a needle and thread. I’d sob while listening to Meryl Streep’s narration. I’ve adored many fictional rabbits growing up, from Thumper in Bambi to Frank in Donnie Darko.
My play Creation is about some of my biggest fears. The horror I feel when I think about being a child today, in this country, in other countries, and just in the world in general. Sometimes I feel like I can’t make eye contact with kids without letting that anxiety seep through. They don’t know what they’ve been brought into. Creation taps into my fear of being a parent (I’m not one, nor do I have the desire, nor do I think I think I’m equipped with whatever it is that drives some people to procreate and devote their lives to their offspring). It’s about my fear of things we once loved changing to the point of being unrecognizable. A deep fear that one day I’ll be alone and won’t be able to connect with anyone. It’s been one of the hardest plays to finish. And of course, it’s still in development, but I spent eight months in a panic over not knowing how to end it.
Rabbits popped into the play in a moment of intuitive stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and then my imagination went really hard with it. I will just say, I’ve always found it interesting that rabbits will sometimes eat their babies. Not for “I must save you from all of the horrors” purposes. But still...that’s enough Jan bait for me.
I’ve always written about things that frighten me to the point of non-stop rumination, and somehow there’s levity and humor instead of ninety minutes of the most depressing shit you’ve ever heard. I guess that’s a survival instinct. This play is speculative, but it’s also a play where I’ve quietly confessed the most things about myself.
While writing this play, I’ve thought about creation and destruction myths. My favorite fact I’ve learned about rabbits in mythology is that in the bible (which I consider mythology/folkore and I should know, I’m a book publishing professional whose job it is to properly categorize literature) they’re considered “unholy” because they eat their own feces. Seems pretty inconsequential compared to other shit that goes down in the bible (no pun intended), but to each their own.
