An ‘Uncommon Genius’: Jane Jones and the Return of Book-It Repertory

Jane Jones, a KP resident since 1996, is the founder and founding co-artistic director of Book-It Repertory Theatre in Seattle and of what, over 33 years, has become nationally known as the trademark Book-It Style.

A repertory theater company performs a rotating repertoire of plays, often with a resident company of actors. Book-It takes this concept a step further, Jones said, adapting novels and short stories for the stage using the author’s exact words. It’s not a typical adaptation where the dialogue is rewritten or scenes rearranged, though the style has evolved over the years to encompass enormous works of literature. But the performance is not a novel being read aloud. Actors voicing the words and thoughts and actions of characters immerse the audience in the world of the book, letting them experience it in a new way.

Book-It has produced more than 100 world-premiere adaptations of literature from such disparate authors as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Colette, Eudora Welty, Tom Robbins, and John Irving. Jones has also played leading roles in America’s most prominent regional theatres; her TV and film credits include “Twin Peaks,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Singles,” “Homeward Bound.” She received the Unsung Hero and Uncommon Genius Award from The Seattle Times, the Women’s University Club of Seattle Brava Award, a Women of Influence Award from the Puget Sound Business Journal, and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation 20th Anniversary Founder’s Grant.

But in 1986, Jones was a 32-year-old journeyman actor driving cross-country in her VW Squareback with her partner, John, to do some rock climbing out West. “I wound up in New York because I had agents that were interested in me, and that worked out well,” she said. “I was doing commercials and had a little bit of luck here and there getting some film stuff, but I was concentrating on live theater.”

Born in Virginia in 1954 to Nancy and Jimmy Jones, Jane was the middle child of five. Jimmy was an engineer who took the family with him when he worked overseas. Jane lived in Korea from ages 6 to 9, in the early 1960s, where she learned the language and local dances, and in London in the late ’60s from ages 13 to 16, where she skipped the ballet classes she loved to go to the West End shows she loved more. When her parents found out, they allowed her to apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Before her audition, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and they were back in her childhood home in Chester five days later. Her father died there at age 42. Jane was 16.

Her mother remarried an old friend and moved away with the younger children, giving Jane the option to finish high school in Chester on a $75 monthly Social Security check. She found spare rooms to live in, graduated high school, and completed two years at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University), where she fell in love with her 25-year-old drama teacher.

“I got married at 19 because that’s what you did then, and we moved to L.A.," Jane said. “We slowly worked our way up the coast and landed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We both got cast and stayed the whole season. He got a job in Florida working at the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center, and I got a job in Eugene at the Oregon Repertory Theatre. And thus began our separation. That would have been like 1976, ’77, after four or five years together. Well, those were good years.”

Jane found her first job in Seattle in 1979, performing in “The Marriage of Barillon” at The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake.

“I had some connections when I got there, and I was fine to stay in Seattle, but I’d worked professionally enough to know that I needed more training.” She joined the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for a few years and then moved on to New York in 1982.

“But I always said when it comes time to go home, I’m coming back to Seattle.” Jane and her then-partner John were both based in New York City. Jane worked in regional theater for months-long productions while John had a regular role on a soap opera that kept him working long hours. When they had time off together, they would spend it on outdoor adventures.

She started reading aloud to pass the time during their long drives.

“I had always had a hard time reading,” she said. “I could audition because I could get very familiar with the text, but reading itself wasn’t pleasurable for me, and I didn’t ever really understand why.”

She opened “A Tale of Two Cities.”

“I just wanted a big honkin’ classic to get through the next couple of months of travel,” she said. “I started reading on the George Washington Bridge (leaving Manhattan).” Sometimes, John would interrupt and ask her to repeat. “I would stop and read it again, and he said I just read the whole sentence backwards. And when I would try to do any polysyllabic words, the syllables would get mixed up. And that’s when I found out I was dyslexic.”

That didn’t stop her.

“It was just great because he could say ‘Oops’ as I was reading and I’d do it over,” she said. “I would put on my headlamp and read into the night, and we would just keep going to the next campground or wherever because we were so involved in the story,” she said.

They had to ration “David Copperfield” while stuck in their tent in a mountain snowstorm. On the way home, it was “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“I was reading all this stuff and I just thought, these are the best scenes ever written for an actor,” she said. “I knew all these out-of-work actors, and we’re all sitting around waiting for the next great play to land in our laps so that we can get our health insurance, and I thought, why aren’t we doing literature on stage? We don’t need big sets. We have the narrative voice right here, and all we need to do is share it with the audience in a way that makes it their own.

“That’s how the Book-It style got started.”

Jane formed the 29th Street Project with other actors. “We found a little space to rent on West 29th Street and we all chipped in $25 a month. I started adapting short stories and we started doing them there,” she said.

“One of the first stories was Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Long Walk to Forever.’ This is a true story about how he asked his wife to marry him, and it starts with Newt and Catherine, the two main people in the story. So, as two actors, we stood hand in hand and started the opening lines, saying together, ‘They had grown up next door to each other.’ And then, talking to the audience, he said, ‘On the fringe of a city,’ and then I would say, ‘through fields and woods.’ We’re just sharing the narrative back and forth. ‘They were older now, hadn’t seen each other in,’ and he would look at me and I’d say, ‘Two years, and there had always been a comfortable, playful warmth between them. But never any talk of love.’”

The two performed the entire story that way, “reading it,” but as dialogue that included all the narration without a narrator. “The ‘he said,’ ‘she said’ became very useful because you can put so many points of view on it,” she said.

Newt was in the Army but had gone AWOL to see her because he’d heard she was getting married.

“In the early afternoon, Newt knocked on Catherine’s front door,” Jane said, as Newt. “Catherine came to the door. She was carrying a fat, glossy magazine she had been reading, devoted entirely to brides. ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ she said, looking next door. ‘No, I didn’t come to see my mother.’ ‘Well, who did you come to see?’ ‘You, because I love you. Now, can we go for a walk?’ ”

“It was just so beautiful; people got it, and it was really successful, even when we were criticized for it,” Jane said. “That’s how we got started. We had already started calling it the Book-It Style.”

She spent a year putting more shows together. By that time, her relationship with John was over, and she was ready to leave New York.

She came back to Seattle in 1987.

“I got a job within two days, so I was like, OK, this is destiny,” Jane said. She worked for the Empty Space and the Seattle Rep and continued to work regionally, all while developing Book-It. Her project had attracted more talent, including her founding co-artistic director Myra Platt and Tom Hulce, who Jane worked with for years. He was impressed by the Book-It approach, supported it, and offered her a suggestion.

“He knew that we wanted to do a novel; he said, what about ‘The Cider House Rules,’ John Irving?” Jane said. She and Hulce and their friend the playwright Peter Parnell read it to each other during a road trip, “everybody taking turns at the reading and at the wheel. And by the time we got to the West Coast, we had all decided we would go for it.”

They produced a workshop version with the Seattle Rep attended by a few celebrities in 1996, including John Irving.

“He had refused to give us the rights to it; he was still working on the screenplay,” Jane said. But they had invited Irving’s eldest son, an aspiring actor, to watch a rehearsal. He told his dad he had to see it.

“We opened at the Leo K Theatre, and he still hadn’t given us the rights to it,” she said. “The curtain comes down, there is a lovely standing ovation. My friend takes us outside, Tom and Peter and me, and John Irving is sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands, sobbing. ‘It’s yours,’ he says.”

Jane and Hulce further developed and later directed Parnell’s adaptation. In 1998, they shared the Back Stage Garland Award for Direction after it opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

It was during these years that Jane became acquainted with the Key Peninsula. She had dinner with Kevin McKeon, a graphic designer she knew from their early acting days, who she was thinking of hiring to do publicity materials. He had a small house near Horseshoe Lake, a far cry from the busy theater life of Seattle.

Jane looked up and down the road, giving the neighborhood and his house an appraising glance. “Kevin McKeon, what are you doing here?”

He answered four years later, at their wedding in 1998. “I guess I was waiting for you.”

They now live in Lakebay, overlooking Carr Inlet. Also, he got the publicity job and became a popular adaptor and director for Book-It, as well as an author and actor.

Book-It Repertory Theatre went on to produce more award-winners, becoming a thriving 501(c)(3) nonprofit for over 30 years. Jane and co-artistic director Platt stepped back in 2020. A new artistic director was hired. The company was selling fewer tickets each season, part of the contraction of American theater, which led to smaller budgets, productions, and casts. After surviving the pandemic, the company closed in 2023.

But Jane returned to take over the 501(c)(3). She produced her adaptation of David Wroblewski’s bestseller “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” with Book-It veteran Charlotte Tiencken’s help at the Vashon Repertory Theatre in October 2024.

“Eighty percent of the audience came from Seattle,” Jane said. So, she thought, maybe she could bring it back to them, too.

But instead of just a production, Jane is adapting the Book-It Repertory Theatre itself.

“Book-It is coming back,” she said. “We’re bringing in former interns to serve on the board, people who came up through Book-It and then went on to become professionals. We want to dip our toe into one production a year. No overhead, no staff, a working board, where everybody’s part of the production.”

“Sawtelle” will open in Seattle next fall.

“And who knows what could happen in 10 years. I might be involved, or I might not, but this is to make way for the new crop to come through and hold on respectfully to the mission of transforming great literature into great theater and to get people to read great literature. That’s the most important thing. I’m terribly excited about it,” she said.