Black Bear has taken worldwide rights to Jonah, the feature adaptation of Rachel Bonds' acclaimed Off-Broadway play. Greta Lee will star as Ana alongside Cooper Hoffman, Edmund Donovan and Hagan Oliveras.
Production is scheduled to begin in September. Black Bear will produce the film, distribute it in the United States and introduce the project to international buyers around TIFF.
Danya Taymor already knows this material
Jonah will mark Taymor's feature directing debut, but it is hardly her first encounter with the story. She directed the Roundabout Theatre Company production in 2024, while Bonds is adapting her own Laurents/Hatcher Award-winning play for the screen.
Hagan Oliveras provides another direct link to that production by returning as Jonah, the role he originated Off-Broadway. The stage version also earned lead performer Gabby Beans both Obie and Lucille Lortel honors.
That continuity gives the film an unusual starting point. Rather than handing the play to filmmakers approaching it from the outside, the adaptation keeps the writer and director who already understand how its structure works and asks them to rebuild it for another medium.
Ana's memories drive the story
Lee plays Ana, whose memories force her to reconsider the defining relationships of her life and the stories she has constructed around them. The narrative spans roughly two decades and three transformative relationships.
The stage version moves through past and present with deliberately slippery boundaries. Trauma, intimacy and self-protection gradually alter the audience's understanding of what Ana remembers and how she has chosen to remember it.
Film gives Taymor a very different set of tools for that structure. Editing, framing and changes in physical space can make memory less theatrical and potentially more subjective, but preserving the original ambiguity will be the difficult part.
Greta Lee leads a compact ensemble
Lee arrives after Past Lives and a growing run of prominent independent projects. Cooper Hoffman, whose credits include Licorice Pizza and I Want Your Sex, is also part of the cast.
Edmund Donovan joins them after recently working with Lee on Late Fame. Oliveras, meanwhile, is the only announced performer directly carrying his character from the Off-Broadway production into the feature.
Tom McCarthy and Rae Baron are producing through Slow Pony alongside Black Bear.
Production starts before a release date exists
Filming is scheduled to begin in September 2026. No release date has been announced.
For now, Jonah's strongest selling point is not scale. It is continuity: a film adaptation being built by several of the artists who already know the material from inside the room.
