Jennifer Coy Jennings carries an entire world on her shoulders — and makes it look effortless.
There’s a moment in “Wild Horses,” when playwright Allison Gregory’s language hits “freedom takers clutching fistfuls of air.” It lands in the room like a stone dropped in still water. The ripples don’t stop. That line alone tells you everything you need to know about this play — and about a production that refuses to flinch.
Let me be clear about something the promotional materials get slightly wrong: this is not, in any conventional sense, a dark comedy. Yes, Gregory’s script has wit, and yes, the promotional copy leans into the “savagely funny” descriptor. There are sharp, dark flashes of humor here — the kind that catches in your throat. But the overriding experience of “Wild Horses” is one of accumulating unease and earned grief. Director Rudy Ramirez and his singular lead actress understand this perfectly, and they deliver accordingly.
I came to this production as someone who grew up in New York City in the same decade the play inhabits — the 1970s — and later migrated to Long Island suburbia. I mention that not as a credential but as a contrast. Gregory’s world is Bakersfield, California: a working-class landscape where the open sky feels less like freedom and more like exposure. Violence here is not the ambient street noise of police sirens or fire trucks in the city I knew. It is intimate and domestic. The people who are supposed to love you deliver it.
The Weight of One Body on a Bare Stage
Jennifer Coy Jennings plays every character in this play. From the teenage girl at the story’s center, to her volatile father, her mother with her own complicated romantic life, the neighborhood boys, her sister and friends. She embodies them all without costume change or theatrical trick, navigating between them through tonal differentiation, posture, gestures, breath, and a command of the spoken word that is nothing short of remarkable. The 2018 B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama and the Austin Critics Table recognition were not accidents. This is an actress operating at a level that commands full attention.
I noticed that Jennings sighed throughout the performance — a recurring physical gesture I read and re-read as the evening progressed. Whether this was a directorial choice or an organic element of her characterization, the effect is the weighted exhalation of someone who has been carrying something unbearable for a very long time. A grown woman revisiting the child she was. Breath as memory. It is the kind of detail that either works completely or not at all.
A Childhood That Does Not Ask Permission to Harm
Gregory draws from her own biography here, and it shows in the damage’s specificity. The father in this play is not a complicated antihero — he is a sadist with a belt. His cruelty toward his daughter is not left to implication or abstraction. It is stated plainly and repeatedly, and Gregory’s language refuses to soften it. For someone who grew up in New York City and later in the suburbia of Long Island during this same era, the level of physical brutality depicted — a father’s methodical beatings, neighborhood boys who bashed a 13-year-old’s head and kicked dogs without provocation — was genuinely jarring. This was not the world I inhabited. This is someone else’s America, and Gregory insists you sit inside it.
Then there is the horse. A creature that represents everything the girl reaches toward — beauty, wildness, a life beyond the one she has been born into. The horse is killed. We never learn who did it. Gregory leaves that question open, and in its unresolved silence lies some of the play’s most affecting work. Who destroys the beautiful things a girl loves? The answer, the play suggests, may be too diffuse to name, too entrenched in a culture of casual cruelty to pin on any single pair of hands.
The subplot involving a 26-year-old man and the teenage protagonist is handled with similar unflinching clarity. The seduction, the pregnancy, the lie embedded in every tender moment — none of it is played for titillation. It is simply what happened to some girls who swooned and fell for a boy/man without the gravitas of critical or independent thinking. The play does not editorialize, instead it juxtaposes the woman telling the story against her sister who allowed the unfortunate event to transpire.
Penfold’s designers made detailed and considered choices. A water cooler. A Steve & Al’s burger joint, a shack that reads visually as something between a roadhouse and a backyard outbuilding — evocative of a live Texas music venue, which sits somewhat oddly against the California setting. I found myself uncertain of its contextual logic, though it was atmospherically compelling. Whether an intentional nod to the play’s Texas home or simply an aesthetic choice, it was the one element whose meaning I couldn’t quite land.
The Music Carries the Era on Its Back
The soundtrack selections deserve particular attention because they are simply excellent. Melanie, 10cc, Thin Lizzy, ZZ Top, and Led Zeppelin to name a few. These are not nostalgia choices deployed carelessly. Each cue is placed with intention, scoring the emotional temperature of the scene rather than merely identifying the period. Boone’s Farm Apple Wine makes its inevitable appearance as an artifact of adolescent ritual, and the play’s relationship to the cultural detritus of the ’70s is consistently smart — neither mocking nor sentimental, but precise.
Gregory’s family here, is dysfunctional in ways that registered differently to audiences of the 1970s than they do now. A mother with a lover. A teenage pregnancy. An absent and abusive father. The play is careful not to over-pathologize its characters, understanding that what appears monstrous from a contemporary vantage point was, for many families in that era and place, simply the texture of Tuesday. That restraint is one of the script’s genuine achievements.
A Playwright Who Has Earned Her Stage
Allison Gregory is not an emerging voice. She has had numerous plays produced nationally and has earned significant recognition, including the Seattle Times Award for Best New Play. Gregory writes with the authority of someone who survived the story she is telling. There is no sentimentality in her self-examination. The play ends not with resolution but with the girl having crossed a threshold she cannot uncross — older, changed, carrying the marks of a summer that altered the shape of everything that followed. The title earns itself quietly. Wild things do not get tamed in this story. They get killed, or they escape.
February 27 – March 15, 2026 | Penfold Theatre, 2120 N Mays St #290, Round Rock, TX
Curtain: 7:30 PM. Parking: Free. Tickets and information: penfoldtheatre.org