MOTHER MARY Comes to Boston Playwrights' Theatre

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) will continue its 2025-26 season with Mother Mary by KJ Moran Velz, running October 9-26. The play, set in 1968 Boston, is a new romantic comedy centered on the unexpected connection between Jo Cruz, a Puerto Rican taxi driver, and Mary O'Sullivan, an Irish American Catholic school teacher. Despite rising tensions between their communities, Mary and Jo find themselves in a close friendship…or is it something more? But their growing connection takes a turn when Mary asks Jo to take her on a risky road trip where there's no going back. 

“Mother Mary is set in the context of very difficult, painful historical circumstances for queer communities and immigrant communities – circumstances that in 2025 feel eerily contemporary. What I love about the play is that it has a truly romantic perspective; romantic in the sense of being optimistic about our co-created future rather than nostalgic about our flawed past,” BPT Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian says. “At the heart of Mother Mary is the belief that with intentionality and love, we can have the relationships, and the communities, that we dream about.”

For playwright KJ Moran Velz, who grew up in the Boston area but has been based in Washington, D.C. for almost 12 years, the play marks a homecoming.

“I'm excited that Mother Mary is coming home,” Moran Velz says. “All of my writing—it's New England, it's Boston, it's still there no matter where I live. It's still Boston—on a personal level, that means so much to me.”

Born from a love of queer history and Boston history, Moran Velz began writing Mother Mary in 2021; that process was accelerated with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. In June, the play was part of Woolly Mammoth's (Washington, D.C.) Pride Plays reading series of works celebrating the LGBTQIA+ experience. In addition to her work as a playwright, Moran Velz is a theatre educator pursuing a master's in Drama Therapy at Lesley University. 

The production is directed by Elaine Vaan Hogue, Professor Emerita at Boston University, where she taught acting and directing for 25 years. In 2011, Vaan Hogue directed Jon Lipsky's Walking the Volcano at BPT. More recent credits include her solo performance as suffragist Julia Ward Howe in Joyce Van Dyke's Representation and How to Get It and, as a director, another “car play” Actors' Shakespeare Project's 2023 production of Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive.

“I just loved [Mother Mary] immediately,” Vaan Hogue says. “I felt so buoyed up by the joy in it . . . It reminded me that there can be so much joy in two people connecting.”