Boston Playwrights' Theatre to Kick Off 2023-24 Season With MR. PARENT

The first production of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s season will be the hilarious and heartbreaking Mr. Parent, written by Melinda Lopez with Maurice Emmanuel Parent, conceived with and directed by BPT Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian. The play, which had a successful run in early 2022 at The Lyric Stage Company of Boston, is a solo piece about Parent’s experiences in Boston Public Schools. It will run October 10-22 at BPT, followed by a move to Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, NY.

“Mr. Parent is the first play I’ve programmed here as Artistic Director, and it exemplifies everything we hope to do at BPT in the years to come,” Sandberg-Zakian. says. “It’s a play created by local artists about a topic that is vital to civic and community life in Boston and in Massachusetts. It also uplifts BPT’s new commitment to second productions—which are a critical step in the birth and growth of a play, allowing artists to take what they learned from the first production and put it into practice in front of an audience. And it also happens to be written by a distinguished alumna of our graduate program in playwriting! I am so thrilled to welcome Melinda Lopez home to the Snodgrass Stage at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.”

“I have been forever changed by my years as a public school teacher,” Parent says. “I am ever grateful for the young people, administrators and dedicated educators who have made me not only a better artist, but a better human.”

Parent, a co-founder and co-artistic director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, is an award-winning performer and director who continues his teaching career as a Professor of the Practice in the Tufts University Department of Theatre Dance and Performance Studies.

Lopez is an award-winning Boston-based actor and playwright known for her plays Mala, Sonia Flew and Becoming Cuba, among others. An alumna of—and now an Adjunct Assistant Professor in—Boston University’s Playwriting Program, Lopez says Mr. Parent resonates in sharper ways now than when it was first developed just a few years ago.

“The challenges of working in schools have been top of mind throughout COVID, but the pressure on teachers feels even more pressing now,” she says. “We are trying to stay mindful of the movement to ban books, and the further marginalization of the LGBTQ community—and how [out in the] open these movements have become. . .Mr. Parent recognizes that the system is set up to rely on teachers as superheroes—the issues of funding and inequity have compounded since we premiered in 2021.”

BPT will provide opportunities for dialogue around the questions raised in the play with a series of post-show conversations, with guests to include Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Senior Advisor on Youth and Schools, Rebecca Grainger, and the play’s Public Education Consultant, author and educator Neema Avashia. A full schedule of events can be found on the BPT website.

After its run at BPT, Mr. Parent will transfer to Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, N.Y., where it will run from November 1-19, part of Geva’s Fielding Subscription Series. The script will be tailored to the community there.

“Learning about the specific challenges in Rochester—which in many ways is very similar to Boston—has been eye-opening,” Lopez says. “[As is] recognizing that the structural inequity in schools is a national issue, not a Boston-centric issue. Also teachers everywhere are amazing.”

BPT’s season also includes Driving in Circles, Jay Eddy’s solo Folktronica musical about the winding road to healing and happiness after intimate violence, a slate of new play workshops beginning this month, and a soon-to-be-announced collaborative project happening in July.

Coming up in September and October, The Studios on Three Next Stage Workshops—part of Boston University’s annual Fringe Festival—features workshop presentations of brand-new plays by second-year M.F.A. playwrights. The events are presented by the BU School of Theatre’s New Play Initiative in association with BPT, and are free to the public.

 

ABOUT BOSTON PLAYWRIGHTS’ THEATRE

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) is an award-winning professional theatre dedicated to new works for the stage. Founded in 1981 by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and located on the campus of Boston University (BU), BPT produces a season of new work, an annual “marathon” of 10-minute plays and a festival of new plays by teenage writers. At the core of all of our work is our partnership with BU’s renowned English Department, in close collaboration with BU’s School of Theatre, as we educate and nurture the writers of the M.F.A. Playwriting Program. The Program’s alumni have had their work produced in regional and New York houses as well as in London’s West End, and have garnered national, regional and local awards, including Elliot Norton and Independent Reviewers of New England Awards for Outstanding New Script. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian, Managing Director Darren Evans, and Head of M.F.A. Playwriting Nathan Alan Davis, BPT is dedicated to the voice and vision of the playwright. www.BostonPlaywrights.org

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Melinda Lopez is an actor and playwright based in Boston. She is thrilled to be partnering with dear friends and colleagues Maurice and Megan to bring this joyful powerful story to the stage. Her work includes Mala, an adaptation of Yerma, Back the Night, Becoming Cuba, Orchids to Octopi, Sonia Flew, the audio series Dream Boston, and coming to The Old Globe in San Diego this spring, Stir, adapted from her Elliot Norton Award-winning Zoom play Black Beans Project.

Maurice Emmanuel Parent Central Square Theater: The Mountaintop, The Convert, Dangerous Liaisons, Angels in America Parts 1 & 2, Director – Ain’t Misbehavin’. Other credits (select): Directing – Choir Boy (SpeakEasy Stage Company), Breath and Imagination (Lyric Stage Company of Boston). Acting – Actors’ Shakespeare Project (resident company member), Barrington Stage Company, Boston Theatre Works, Cape Playhouse, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Fulton Opera House, Greater Boston Stage Company, The Huntington, Music Theatre of Wichita, New Repertory Theatre, Northern Stage, Off the Grid Theatre Company, SpeakEasy Stage Company, Wheelock Family Theatre. Television: Castle Rock, Kevin Can F*** Himself. Winner of three Elliot Norton Awards (most recently the 2023 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director, Midsize Theatre for Seven Guitars for Actors’ Shakespeare Project), and three Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Awards. Currently he is a Professor of the Practice in the Tufts University Department of Theatre Dance and Performance Studies and the Co-Founder/Co-Producing Artistic Director of The Front Porch Arts Collective, a Black theater company committed to advancing racial equity through art. First incubated at Central Square Theater, “The Porch” is currently the theatre in residence at The Huntington. His one man show Mr. Parent, co-written with Melinda Lopez and conceived with Megan Sandberg-Zakian, will be part of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s 2023-2024 season.

Megan Sandberg-Zakian is a theater director, author, and facilitator with a passion for the development of vital new American plays for the stage and the ear. Across all facets of her work, she focuses on holding space for difficult conversations, facilitating engagements that can accommodate multiple complex truths and allow buried narratives to emerge. She is currently the Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights Theatre, an award-winning professional theater dedicated to new work for the stage located on the campus of Boston University. Favorite recent directing projects include Nat Turner in Jerusalem (New York Theatre Workshop), House of Joy (California Shakespeare Theatre), Skeleton Crew (Huntington Theatre Co), The High Ground (Arena Stage), and Audible Originals Rapture Season and Evil Eye(Audie Award for Best Original Work; Gracie Award for Original Online Programming). Megan is a graduate of Brown University and holds an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Theater Award and the TCG Future Leaders fellowship, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and a proud member of SDC, the union for professional stage directors and choreographers. Her book, There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism and Honesty is available from The 3rd Thing Press. She lives in Jamaica Plain, MA, with her wife Candice. Megansz.com

 

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