Boston Playwrights' Theatre 2015-16 Season to Feature Works by Robert Brustein & More

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) today announces the three new plays that will comprise its 34th season. The line-up includes Exposed by Robert Brustein, Back the Night by Melinda Lopez and Rhinoceros adapted by Wesley Savick.

"I'm so proud to have these wonderful playwrights with us to explore our current state of affairs in America," says BPT Artistic Director Kate Snodgrass. "These plays comment brilliantly on what we face daily."

The company's season will open in December with Exposed by Robert Brustein, a Boston University New Play Initiative production co-produced with Boston Center for American Performance. When a Texas billionaire is in need of forgiveness, he goes straight to God's right hand-a Christian televangelist who talks to the Lord on a regular basis (or so he says). But when Cockburn comes to roost in Seymour's mansion, all Hell breaks loose. Exposed will be directed by Steven Bogart. Playwright Robert Brustein is the founding director of Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theatre, and currently serves as a senior research fellow at Harvard University and a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University.

In February, BPT will present Melinda Lopez's Back the Night. With violence on campus rising to epidemic proportions, Em will have none of it. But when her best friend Cassie gets assaulted, Em makes some unexpected discoveries. Daniela Varon will direct. Lopez-a Boston University Playwriting alumna-is a playwright, actress and educator. She is currently the inaugural Mellon playwright-in-residence at the Huntington Theatre Company and teaches theatre and performance at Wellesley College and playwriting at Boston University.

The final play of the season is Wesley Savick's adaptation of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, a co-production with the Suffolk University Theatre Department. Savick will also direct this brand-new version of Ionesco's 20th century absurdist masterpiece. An alumnus of Boston University's Playwriting Program, Savick is the author of 25 plays including Car Talk: The Musical!!! adaptations of Alan Lightman's Mr g and Einstein's Dreams.

ABOUT BOSTON PLAYWRIGHTS' THEATRE

Founded in 1981 at Boston University by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) is an award-winning professional theatre dedicated to new works. At the heart of BPT's mission is the production of new plays by alumni of its M.F.A. Playwriting Program, the latter in collaboration with Boston University'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 12 IRNE Awards for Best New Script and six Boston Critics' Association Elliot Norton Awards.

ABOUT THIS SEASON'S PLAYWRIGHTS

ROBERT BRUSTEIN was born in New York in 1927 and educated at Amherst (B.A. 1948) and Columbia University (M.A. 1949 and Ph.D. 1957). He is a veteran of World War II, having gone to sea in the Merchant Marine. He held a Fulbright Fellowship to England from 1953-55. After teaching at Cornell, Vassar, and Columbia, he became Dean of the Yale School of Drama (1966-79) and then Professor of English at Harvard (1979-2002). He is now Senior Research Fellow at Harvard and Distinguished Professor of Theatre at Suffolk University.

He was the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre and served for 20 years as Director of the Loeb Drama Center where he founded the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard. He retired from the Artistic Directorship in 2002 and now serves as Founding Director.

A blogger for the Huffington Post beginning in 2007, and theatre critic for The New Republic since 1959, Robert Brustein is the author of 20 books on theatre and society including The Theatre of Revolt, Making Scenes (a memoir of his Yale years), Reimagining American Theatre, The Third Theatre, Revolution as Theatre, Who Needs Theatre, Dumbocracy in America, Cultural Calisthenics Letters to a Young Actor, The Siege of the Arts, Millennial Stages and a new book on Shakespeare, The Tainted Muse: Prejudices and Presumptions. His last collection Rants and Raves was released in 2014.

He has supervised well over 200 productions, acting in eight and directing 12, including his own adaptations of The Father, Ghosts, The Changeling and the trilogy of Pirandello works: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) and Tonight We Improvise. His Six Characters in Search of an Author won the Boston Theatre Award for Best Production of 1996.

He has written 11 adaptations for the American Repertory Theatre, including his Klezmer musical Shlemiel the First, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken (directed by Robert Wilson), Three Farces and a Funeral, Enrico IV, and his final production at the ART, Lysistrata. Shlemiel the First was produced at Theatre J in Washington, D.C. and then at the New Jersey Meadowbrook Festival in 2010. In 2009, he conceived and created a presentation for the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, featuring F. Murray Abraham, Brooke Adams, and Tony Shalhoub, in Nashville called Doctor Hippocrates is Out: Please Leave a Message. His recent musical, The King of Second Avenue, completed a highly successful sold-out run in the spring of 2016, and a new play with music, Exposed, is scheduled to open in December of 2016.

His full-length plays include Demons; Nobody Dies on Friday; The Face Lift; Spring Forward, Fall Back; and The Shakespeare Trilogy (including The English Channel, Mortal Terror, and The Last Will). His short plays Poker Face, Chekhov on Ice, Divestiture, AnchorBimbo, Noises, Terrorist Skit, Airport Hell, Beachman's Last Poetry Reading, and Sex For a Change were all presented by the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and form an evening called Broken News.

Over the course of his long career as director, playwright, and teacher, he has participated in the artistic development of such theatre artists as Meryl Streep, Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Walken, Cherry Jones, Ted Talley, Michael Feingold, Sigourney Weaver, James Naughton, Mark Linn-Baker, Henry Winkler, James Lapine, Tony Shalhoub, Tommy Derrah, Lewis Black, Rocco Landesman, Linda Lavin, Michael Yeargan, William Ivey Long, Derek Maclane, Steve Zahn, Peter Sellars, Santo Loquasto, Tom Moore, Albert Innaurato , and many others.

He is married to Doreen Beinart, and has one son, Daniel Brustein, two stepchildren, Peter Beinart and Jean Beinart Stern, and six grandchildren.

MELINDA LOPEZ is a playwright, actress, and educator. She is the inaugural playwright-in-residence at the Huntington Theatre Company and a past Huntington Playwriting Fellow. Her play Sonia Flew (Elliot Norton and IRNE Awards, dir. Nicholas Martin) inaugurated the Huntington's home for new work, the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, in 2004. It has subsequently been produced at Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, the Summer Playwrights Festival (NY), the Milagro Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and many others, and was broadcast on NPR's "The Play's The Thing!" Other plays include Caroline in Jersey (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Orchids to Octopi (IRNE Award, Central Square Theatre, commissioned by the National Institute of Health), Gary (Steppenwolf's First Look Repertory of New Work, Boston Playwrights' Theatre), Alexandros (Laguna Playhouse), a new translation of Blood Wedding (Suffolk University), God Smells Like A Roast Pig (Women on Top Festival, Elliot Norton Award-Outstanding Solo Performance), Midnight Sandwich / Medianoche (Coconut Grove Playhouse), The Order of Things (CentaStage, Kennedy Center Fund for New Plays), How Do You Spell Hope? (Underground Railway Theatre), and Becoming Cuba (Huntington Theatre Company and North Coast Repertory Theatre). She is among the first cohort to receive three-year-playwright-in-residency grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a "promising new voice in American Theatre."

WESLEY SAVICK has written more than 25 professionally produced plays and has directed more than 90 professional productions. He has served as artistic director of the internationally acclaimed ensemble Theatre X and is founding artistic director of The National Theater of Allston. Most recently, he wrote and directed adaptations of Alan Lightman's two novels Mr g and Einstein's Dreams at Central Square Theatre. (Einstein's Dreams premiered at the Broad Institute as part of the inaugural Cambridge Science Festival and subsequently toured to the first World Science Festival in NYC.) He wrote and directed a new play commissioned by Catalyst Collaborative @MIT based on the life of Henry Molaison, the most-studied brain patient of the 20th century (Yesterday Happened: Remembering H.M., which also featured original music by Tod Machover). Savick wrote script, lyrics and directed Car Talk: The Musical!!! at Central Square Theater and Miss Margaret LaRue in "Milwaukee" at Boston Playwrights' Theatre. He is currently working with James Carroll on a theatricalization of Mr. Carroll's history House of War: The Pentagon and the Distrastrous Rise of American Power, to be produced at the Modern Theatre by Suffolk University in fall 2016. Savick is Professor of Theatre at Suffolk University.

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