Boston Playwrights' Theatre Continues Its 2022-23 Season Of New Plays With OTP By Elise Wien

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) continues its 2022-23 season with OTP by Elise Wien. Running from December 8-18, the play is directed by Enzo Gonzales.

Set in 2015, the comedy centers on 15-year-old best friends Ceci and Michelle. By day, they're students in Oak Park, Illinois. By night, they take the internet by storm, crafting an alternate universe where a teenage President Obama courts the teenage President of Oak Park High School-and takes her political advice. A lyrical and engaging love letter to fanfiction and teenage friendship, OTP also asks how the stories we tell ourselves and others shape our political discourse and our sense of civic responsibility.

Playwright Wien describes OTP as "an amalgam of the questions that keep me up at night."

"I know I live in a dying empire, but what if I kind of want to save it? Why do I want to save it?" she says. "My own approach to our current government is often layered with fantasy-the fantasy of a functioning democracy, a land that I have the right to, a national myth with sour origins but ultimately good intentions. This piece came out of a place of missing Obama and feeling nostalgic for the Obama era in my life, and then sort of interrogating that nostalgia, thinking, 'Why does this era give me the warm and fuzzies, and should it?' Am I nostalgic for an era when colorblindness felt more acceptable? Am I reworking my memory of the country pre-Trump? How might I 'break up' with my nostalgia, and then once I do, where do I put my sense of kinship and hope? How much of my investment in nationhood and civic life is fandom? And how much is fantasy?"

Wien's other plays include [cowboy face] (Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting, 2021; finalist, Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers, 2020), cara has a hole in her head (Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, 2020), and Osher and the Infinite Curtain. Her play Craters, or the making of the making of the moon landing, was produced by Smith College earlier this year.

Director Enzo Gozales makes his Boston professional directing debut with this production. Gonzales is an M.F.A. Directing candidate at Boston University's College of Fine Arts School of Theatre, where he has directed Madeleine Sayet's Antigone, or And Still She Must Rise Up, as well as Steve Yockey's Mercury. Other credits include work with NYC's Rising Sun Performance Company and American Theatre of Actors.

All the plays in BPT's 2022-23 season were written by the Boston University M.F.A. Playwriting Program class of 2023, and will be co-produced with the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Theatre as part of its New Play Initiative.

BPT's season continues in February with Jado Jehad by Fatima A. Maan and concludes in April with Alligator-a-Phobia in 3D!, a play with music by Jay Eddy.

BPT's COVID-19 Safety procedures proved to be very effective in keeping audiences and performers safe last season; audiences will be required to wear masks for the duration of their time at the theatre. Up-to-the-minute information regarding performance schedules, COVID-19 protocols and ticketing can be found on the BPT website (www.BostonPlaywrights.org) under Visit Us > COVID-19 Safety.

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) is an award-winning professional theatre at Boston University (BU) dedicated to new works. Founded in 1981 by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, the heart of BPT's mission is the production of new plays by students and alumni of BU's M.F.A. Playwriting Program-a collaboration with BU's renowned School of Theatre. The program's award-winning alumni have been produced in regional and New York houses, as well as in London's West End. BPT's productions have been honored with numerous regional and Boston awards, including awards from the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) and Boston Critics' Association (Elliot Norton Awards).

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