In her thirties, wanting children and needing financial stability, Rincón found herself facing a crisis of faith. Despite her lifelong devotion to the theater, she wondered if she had chosen the wrong path. Maybe it was time to start over, she thought. She considered going back to school to become a doctor, a profession that offered security and purpose.
Her father, who had attended Columbia Medical School, was adamantly against the idea. "Don't do it," he told her. "You have two Yale degrees and a lot of student loans to pay off. I'm going to have to disown you if you do this." But after he was done joking, he added the words that have stuck with her ever since.
"Jennifer, we have doctors to heal our bodies, and we have artists to heal our souls," she recalls him saying. "I gave my son the same advice when he was considering changing his major after getting into music school; he still thanks me to this day. I pass that advice on to everyone because we live in a horrible time, in a country obsessed with fame and fortune that's against everything Anton Chekhov wrote about. He was a humanist who wrote about how hard life is. Theater, and especially Chekhov's plays, gives us the tools to connect and go on living."
Since that moment, Rincón has remained dedicated to theater, becoming a guiding force in Denver’s artistic scene after she moved here in 1991 to work as the head of acting at the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts; in 2010, she founded Visionbox Studio in response to the conservatory's closing. She built a life around the theater, marrying and raising three children while directing and teaching, always returning to the power of the stage as a way to make sense of the human condition, with Chekhov's work serving as a critical reference point.
"At the end of Chekhov's plays, someone always dies," she says. "But then there are people left onstage that have to go on. We don't know what the fuck will happen next, but people will come after, and we have to go on living."
Lately, that philosophy has ceased to be just a guiding principle — it has become her reality.
Tragedy Strikes
On December 26, 2024, Rincón son and both of her daughters, along with their spouses, and a dog, Lolo, were in a car crash on their way to ski at Winter Park. Her son-in-law, William Herrera, affectionately known as Willy, was killed instantly. Her middle daughter, Sonia, was rushed to Denver Health in a coma, never regained consciousness and passed away on January 4. Her son, her eldest daughter and her husband, and Lolo all suffered serious injuries but are expected to recover physically.
"This is the worst, most horrific thing that can happen to any family," Rincón says. "I would say it's like we were in Vietnam. In a car explosion. I mean, it's so complex. All of them could be dead. They're not, thank God. For the survivors, it's all going to change over the course of the next few years. But right now, taking care of my family is keeping me strong and connected. I’m at peace. I have no regrets."
Rincón shared news of her loss in an email she sent to her theater company and Visionbox Studio's newsletter subscribers on January 17. “This horrific nightmare reminds me why I am an artist," she wrote. "This is my calling, and I know that theatre is a way to experience the universal truths of the human condition while perhaps most importantly to find connection in this disconnected technological world where we live inside these screens."
In the days following the tragedy, Rincón found herself returning to a passage from a love letter Olga Knipper-Chekhov wrote to husband Anton after he passed away: “I feel you everywhere, in the grass and in the trees and in the murmuring of the wind. When I go out walking, your light, transparent form is walking next to me, stick in hand, sometimes close to me, sometimes very far away, leaving no trace on the ground in a blueish mountain haze and now I feel your head against my cheek.”
She sees Sonia and Willy in those words. Rincón recalls how the two enjoyed walking together, exploring trails and forests, and existing in motion, side by side. And now, she believes, they are still moving together somewhere beyond this world.
"There's some beauty in the fact that they are walking," she says. "When Olga says, 'I feel you everywhere,' I know that Sonia is with Willy and I feel that all the time. There are so many photos of them walking together, and now they are forever — that was them."
For Rincón, this unimaginable loss is something she is still learning to endure. Yet in the depths of her grief, she finds herself turning to the art form that has defined her life: theater.
"At the end of his life, Chekhov was dying of tuberculosis but still writing works of art," she says. "They're all kinds of parallels right now between me and Chekhov. Now, I'm not dying, but my daughter just died and I'm still creating. I have endurance and strength that come from my experience in my life."
Rincón pursued her BA in theater studies at Yale University, followed by an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama. A recipient of an NEA Directing Fellowship at Playwright’s Horizons in New York City and a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Bogotá, Rincón was at the National Theatre Conservatory from 1991 to 2008, directing over 100 productions and mentoring countless actors. After the DCPA closed the conservatory, she co-founded Visionbox with her friend, actor Bill Pullman, to provide graduate-level actor training based on her studies at the Yale School of Drama and to create new works in Denver.
Still, "everyone in my life knew that my children were my top priority," she says. "I had my three children while I was at the DCPA. I was pregnant basically the entire time I worked there, doing my job but also raising my kids. Thank God their father was there for them every moment of their childhood."
Sonia, in particular, gives her mother strength...both in life and death (Rincón often speaks of her in the present tense). Rincón named her second daughter after a Chekhovian character — Sonia in Uncle Vanya, which she later learned meant wisdom — and from an early age, Sonia carried a quiet wisdom that often took Rincón by surprise. When Sonia was about seven years old, she was playing on a swing outside the family's house in Capitol Hill and said something that now runs through Rincón's head repeatedly.
"Sonia said to me, 'God brought me to you and put me in your pocket,'" she remembers. "Now, I had never used the word God in front of Sonia in my life. I have no idea where she heard the word God. We are not a religious family. I would say were spiritual. I've always believed in a higher power; there's something out there. To me, God is love and that's just all I know, but to have my own daughter Sonia say to me, 'God brought me to you,' that's been running through my head every five seconds."
Rincón finds comfort in the fact that she and Sonia talked regularly on the phone. "I had to work hard to stay connected with her because she's lived so far away ever since she went to college," Rincón says. Sonia met Willy while in Washington, D.C., pursuing a bachelor's degree in Spanish studies, when they both were eighteen. They married while still in school.
"They've been married for over a decade in May," Rincón reflects. "They both are turning thirty this year. It’s very rare in this day and age for some people to meet, fall in love and stay together for the rest of their lives, but I had no doubt that they were soulmates."
According to Rincón, Sonia is a lot like her father. "She doesn't care what other people think of her; Sonia cares only about her family and her husband," Rincón says. "She helps people in her job [as a court-certified Spanish interpreter and freelance translator], but it was really just to make enough money to go on trips. The American dream or whatever the hell that is, Sonia is the opposite of that. She believes life is about living each day as if it were your last. She lived like that."
Sonia and Willy built a life together rooted in love, adventure and a deep connection to family. They traveled extensively, exploring the world with an insatiable curiosity. Their husky, Lolo, was like their child, accompanying them on hikes and journeys.
[image-11] In many ways, Rincón believes Sonia "is a Chekhov character": introspective, deeply feeling and bound to a sense of fate that shaped her path. Rincón recalls a moment from The Seagull, a Chekhov play that has taken on new meaning now. In the final scene, Nina, after enduring heartbreak and loss, returns to Treplev, who has spent years longing for her. He wants her to stay, to choose him, but she has come to understand something deeper about life.
"I know now it’s not about fame or glory or the things I used to dream about but it’s about the ability to endure and to have faith," Nina says. "I have faith now and it’s not so hard anymore." Treplev, still lost in dreams, tells her, "You’ve found your way but I’m swirling around in a world of dreams and images and I don’t know who I am or why I live."
Rincón sees herself and Sonia in Nina's words: "That’s what Sonia is like with Willy. All she has ever wanted was him. Nothing else matters to her in her life, and that’s why she is the most unique human I’ve ever met." At Sonia and Willy's farewell, Rincón read the final lines of Chekhov's Three Sisters, where Irina, in the wake of unspeakable loss, resolves to keep moving forward.
"A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for, why there is this misery; there will be no mysteries and, meanwhile, we have got to live," Irina says. "We have got to work, only to work! Tomorrow I'll go alone; I'll teach in the school, and I'll give all my life to those who may need me. Now it's autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work."
Those words are not just a literary farewell for Rincón, but a directive — an insistence that life must continue, that meaning must be sought even in the most senseless of losses. The act of working, of creating, of pushing forward, is both a necessity and a form of survival.
As she and her family rebuild, Jennifer McCray Rincón holds onto images of Sonia and Willy walking together.
Jennifer Rincon
The Next Act
It is this belief that draws Rincón back to Visionbox, back to the structure and purpose of the theater. In the wake of everything, she has found that the only way through grief is to keep going. So last month, she resumed classes and projects like American Addict, a devised piece created from interview with addicts in recovery, and the Queer Theatre Project, a series of gay plays made possible with a grant from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation."Visionbox is me," Rincón says. "But not in the sense of ego. It is me in that I am a messenger of a way of working how I was trained, of my background and experience and then under it all who I am as a person. I know I am not driven by ego, and neither was my daughter."
Rincón is currently in rehearsal for Juliet and her Romeo, with a production set for Saturday, March 22, at the Eisenhower Chapel. "This performance is about finding peace in a time of conflict and even hatred," she says. "To find light and love that heals all of us, and that’s what theater can do."
The play was selected after her daughter's passing and was inspired by Sonia and Willy as well as the current Visionbox ensemble, Rincón says. Rehearsals for the production began on February 24 with actors already enrolled in the company's Shakespeare scene study class and members of Visionbox's permanent ensemble.
"I've always told people that theater is about relationships," Rincón says. "It has healing power. Theater’s not about what jobs you do, what companies you work at or the press you receive; it’s about the people. It’s hard to live, but theater's helped me get through all my life; theater is my God. For me, theater is all about healing, hope and expressing the universal truths of the human condition."
Rincón credits her sobriety, her family and her art for keeping her anchored. "If I were still drinking, I would not be able to endure this pain," she admits. "But I was saved for this moment, where I have got to be the strongest person on the face of the Earth."
Theater is not an escape from reality," she notes; it is a way of engaging with and enduring it. "As Chekhov describes 'Autumn roses ... beautiful autumn roses beautiful and sad,' and that's where I live now," Rincón wrote in an email to a group of her actors on February 7. "All of my life is beautiful and sad...but not meaningless and not depressing. Just very very painful and very very beautiful."
As she and her family rebuild, Rincón holds onto the image of Sonia and Willy walking together, forever. "Now they are somewhere else, still walking," she says.
She will keep moving, too. Like Irina, like Nina, like Sonia. She will work. She will endure. And through her family, her calling and faith, she will find a way forward.
Visionbox presents Juliet and her Romeo, Saturday, March 22, Eisenhower Chapel in Lowry Town Center, 293 Roslyn Street. Learn more at visionbox.org.
