DEAL ME OUT Opens At Boston Playwrights' Theatre

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) concludes its 2019-20 season of new plays with Deal Me Out by MJ Halberstadt. The comic drama runs from February 13 to March 1 and is directed by Shana Gozansky.

The play, set in November 2016, centers on a group of gamers whose insular world begins to mimic the increasingly polarized environment "outside." Playwright Halberstadt says the inspiration for the play came from a true story filmmaker Sadie Rogers related in an interview about her short film RPG, in which the leader of a chess group had a deeply emotional reaction after being kicked out.

"Something about it stuck in my teeth," Halberstadt says. "So I wrote the first draft in a one-week rush in September 2016, switching the activity to board games, which I know a little more about."

The idea was further enhanced by events of the time-specifically the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the U.S.

"That [first] draft didn't touch politics at all but after the election that November I was compelled to go back to this half-formed examination of group in-fighting and apply it to the times," Halberstadt says. "So much importance is placed on the premise of teams and groups-questions of membership, loyalty, purity, factions, exclusion, hierarchy, and why groups exist in the first place. In many cases, groups are necessitated by the existence of rules, and the blame for so much tension across and among groups should really be attributed to the nature of some of those rules. Different rules, like implementing a Ranked Choice Voting system across the U.S., could alleviate a lot of the tension-the same way that different rules might prevent a game of Monopoly from getting too destructive."

Halberstadt's other plays include the Elliot Norton Award-winning The Launch Prize, produced by Bridge Repertory Theater in 2016 and That Time the House Burned Down (produced by Fresh Ink Theatre in 2016). He is an alumnus of Boston University's M.F.A. Playwriting Program and the Huntington Theatre Fellows program. His play The Usual Unusual is a SpeakEasy Stage Company Boston Project commission.

"I'm excited by MJ's ability to take our current state of fractured politics and examine just how complicated, nuanced, and personal this moment is by pulling us into a group of friends who have found safety with their fellow misfits...or so they thought," Shana Gozansky, director of Deal Me Out, says. "The questions this play asks explore just how personal the political is while also asking what we owe each other. And it's funny."

Gozansky directed BPT's season opener, Karen Zacarías's The Book Club Play. She also helmed BPT's 2017 production of Molly Smith Metzler's Elemeno Pea. Gozansky has also worked with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and area theatres including Gloucester Stage Company, Central Square Theater and Trinity Repertory Company.

A post-show conversation with members of Deal Me Out's creative team will follow the Feb. 15 performance.

Tickets: call 866.811.4111 or visit www.bostonplaywrights.org