Boston Playwrights' Theatre Reveals 2024-2025 Season

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) has announced its 2024-2025 season. The line-up includes four dynamic new plays by playwrights in their final year of Boston University’s MFA in Playwriting Program, a public reading of a play-in-progress by the recipient of the Jack Welch Developmental Residency and Boston Theater Marathon XXVII.

At the season’s center are two “reps”—fall and spring mini-festivals of new plays written by BU’s MFA in Playwriting Program class of 2025—that will each offer audiences the opportunity to see two plays in conversation with each other and the chance to witness these new voices as they launch their professional writing careers. Both rep festivals also include related post-show events designed to deepen audience engagement with these writers and plays.

“I’m thrilled about this season’s rep experiment,” BPT Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian says. “These four playwrights, the first to go through the program with [Head of MFA Playwriting] Nathan Alan Davis, are poised to become important new voices in the American theater. Presenting their work in this festive format emphasizes our desire to celebrate that! While the four writers represent wildly diverse perspectives, styles and narratives, all of their work will be beautifully showcased in the kind of production BPT does best—text-forward, technically simple and breathtakingly intimate.”
 

The plays comprising the Fall Rep Festival are Maggie Kearnan’s How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos (directed by Taylor Stark) and Tina Esper’s Soft Star (directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary), pairing a chaotic dark comedy about capitalism with a classic American domestic drama. Although the two plays couldn’t be more different, both are concerned with the dangerous fantasy of the “American dream,” asking: What toxic messages have we received about what our lives can and should look like—and at what cost?

The Spring Rep Festival features The Fig Tree, and The Phoenix, and The Desire to Be Reborn by Isabelle Fereshteh Sanatdar Stevens (directed by Nikta Sabouri) and The Recursion of a Moth by Brandon Zang (directed by KATIE BROOK), two plays about the power of love to transcend the boundaries of sequential time. Zang’s Moth is a sci-fi time travel love story that literally goes to the moon and back, whereas Stevens’ Fig Tree follows a poetic but fated childhood romance set under a tree in Southern Iran. The two writers are interested in concepts of home and family, and how those concepts transform for peoples displaced from their homelands due to war or other trauma.

BPT’s second annual Jack Welch Developmental Residency will culminate in a public reading of residency recipient Ginger Lazarus’ new play Trust. Lazarus graduated from BU’s Playwriting Program in 2002, and this gift provides 30 hours of development time for her to explore and evolve her new play with collaborators.

The season closes in May with Boston Theater Marathon XXVII. The BTM is an award-winning all-day “marathon” of new ten-minute plays chosen from submissions from New England playwrights, and produced by New England theatre companies. The annual event benefits the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, an organization that provides financial relief to individual theatre practitioners in Greater Boston.

All of this season’s activity—and more—will be featured on a new and improved BostonPlaywrights.org, set to launch as rehearsals for the Fall Rep begin. The site boasts an intuitive, user-centric design that will enhance the overall user experience, enabling visitors to find information quickly and easily.

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