KILL THE MAGISTRATE Comes to Boston Playwrights' Theatre as Part of the Jack Welch Developmental Residency

Boston Playwrights' Theatre has announced the first recipient of the Jack Welch Developmental Residency, Boston University Playwriting alumna Abbey Fenbert for her play Kill the Magistrate. The Residency reflects the theatre's mission to offer continued support to develop playwrights' visions for new work.

“I was thrilled to read so many exciting submissions from our alumni writers for BPT's first annual Jack Welch Developmental Residency—and I fell immediately in love with Kill the Magistrate,” BPT Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian says. “It's an energetic, strange, time-bending revenge play—set in colonial New England, but tackling timeless civic questions: When we fight for justice, are we willing to accept the cost? Can a violent revolution lead to a just peace? Is intersectional feminism possible? This is exactly the kind of play I think we need now, and I am so pleased to be able to support the next stage of its development.”

Jack Welch, who died in 2017 and whose estate provides endowed funding to the theatre for the support and playwrights and new plays, was a longtime, tireless supporter of Boston's theatre community through his work with theatrical publishing house Baker's Plays and local theatre service organization StageSource.

“Jack had a lifetime love affair with new works for the stage. Not only was he an astute and brilliant reader of plays, but he was always coming up with innovative ideas to encourage writers of all ages,” former Artistic Director of BPT Kate Snodgrass says. “Jack knew the business of playwriting, both its challenges and its rewards. He trusted us to continue his legacy.”

Snodgrass collaborated with Welch for decades on a number of initiatives including the Massachusetts Young Playwrights' Project, which pairs playwright mentors with area high schools to learn the craft of writing short plays, and the annual Boston Theater Marathon, a ten-hour-long festival of ten-minute plays benefitting the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund.

“These funds are a lifeline to the powerful communication that writers can offer to our audiences, holding the ‘mirror up to nature' that is so vital to our culture,” Snodgrass says. “Jack understood it all, with his big, bold heart and his gift for understanding the root of every problem. This is us remembering that the buck stops with Jack Welch. It always did, and now it always will.”

Set in 1600s New England, Kill the Magistrate centers on six women gathering to plot the murder of their town's magistrate…but as the night wears on, the trees seem determined to deliver messages and strange objects fall from the sky—and the conspirators' varying reasons for wanting the magistrate dead start to threaten their alliance. This energetic, heightened, time-bending new play asks the age-old question: when you violently overthrow the patriarchy, how do you avoid replacing it with something worse?

 

The Residency provides 30 hours of development time for Fenbert to explore and evolve her play with collaborators. The week culminates with a free public reading on Monday, Dec. 4, at 7 p.m.

Fenbert, who received her M.F.A. in Playwriting from BU in 2015, says she is excited and grateful for the opportunity to return to Boston and explore Kill the Magistrate.

“The pandemic in particular altered the landscape of new play development, and it's been awhile since I've engaged in a development process that wasn't facilitated mostly on Zoom,” Fenbert says. “This play has time-bendy elements and in some ways this is a little like getting to travel back to my M.F.A. days. There are elements to this work—an all-female ensemble of very intense people, an exploration of history inspired by a modern moment, a stylized language—that I trace back to how my writing developed when I was a BU grad student. Over the course of my time in the program my writing became at once more personal and more ambitious, and I hope this piece reflects that growth. It's also my first play set in New England!”

Fenbert's other plays include Child and Sickle, which BPT produced in 2015. She's received multiple honors from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, including the 2013 Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting for her play Intentions.

The workshop will be directed by Courtney Elkin Mohler, who serves on the Theatre faculty at Boston College. Mohler's recent directing credits include Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (Butler University) and Larissa Fast Horse's What Would Crazy Horse Do? (Santa Clara University).

The cast of Kill the Magistrate features Kortney Adams, Annika Burley, Eliza Fichter, Sage Gunning, Sarah Newhouse and Kaili Y. Turner. Fanni Horvath stage manages.

 

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