Inside the Jar with Ireon Roach
This article was first published in BU Today on March 25, 2021 by Joel Brown. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
When you jump into The Jar, it means you’re down for art, positivity, and community. The nonprofit is a different kind of arts organization, founded to both broaden the audience for theater and foster community among audience members and artists. One of the leaders making that happen is theater major Ireon Roach (CFA’21), its curator-in-residence and soon-to-be codirector.
“Meet Ire and you’re just blown away,” says The Jar’s interim board chair Samantha Tan, an executive coach and fellow of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership.
In fall 2019, The Jar held an event featuring the play Alma by Benjamin Benne, a two-hander about a Mexican immigrant mother and her US-born daughter, just after the 2016 election. The cast consisted of New York actor Ceci Fernandez and Roach, then a BU junior from Chicago, where she was a member of The Yard theater company and a veteran of that city’s slam poetry scene. Guy Ben-Aharon, The Jar’s founding director, had previously seen Roach perform with Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage in School Girls.
“I think she was surprised to see how diverse The Jar’s audience was,” Ben-Aharon says, “and she stuck around for the dialogue because she couldn’t not. It was so electric in the room she was in, to see what the community made of it.”
After a second event a few weeks later, Roach was hooked.
“I was blown away by the depth of the conversation afterward,” Roach says. “They all jumped right into that conversation from such a deeply vulnerable place, a place conversations normally take weeks to get to.”
As The Jar moved entirely online during the pandemic, she became a mainstay, starting its World in Progress series, where theater-makers, musicians, writers, and other artists share their works in progress with online audience members and dialogue afterward. The emphasis is not, how perfect is my art? says Tan. It’s, how does my art move you?
“That’s the bread and butter of The Jar,” Roach says. “Guy and I are both theater people, but we are not about putting on a play every week. We are putting together a space that uses art to center a community and allow people to see others in themselves a little more clearly and authentically.”
“We are rooted in radical vulnerability,” she adds, to set aside differences and “just be a person with another person. The more I say that and the more I practice it, it’s becoming a little less radical and a little more normal—I can’t wait until that isn’t a radical idea. And that’s what The Jar is working on.”
Roach, whose mother is from Jamaica, goes by Ire, pronounced “I-ree,” as in “irie,” the Jamaican word for good, happy, pleasant. As a writer and host, she is not afraid to tackle tough topics like race and her father’s incarceration. But on a recent Thursday, her smile was bright and her vibe positive as she welcomed about two dozen Bostonians to Zoom to hear and discuss a new work by a Roxbury singer-songwriter.
Your typical Boston theater evening does not begin as she began this one: “A moment of silence, a moment of joy, to bring your mind’s eye to something good within you.”
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“All systems we live within force us to build walls between us and a person that’s different,” Roach says. “This organization is about—maybe if just for an hour on Zoom—you getting to poke out one of those bricks in the wall and peek through and see the person on the other side, and maybe see yourself a little more fully, because you have more room to be.”