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11/06/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 11/07/2024 10:00

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Offers Prime Comeuppance for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos

Boston Playwrights' Theatre Offers Prime Comeuppance for Amazon's Jeff Bezos

Wild satire by Maggie Kearnan and a drama by Tina Esper kick off BPT's 2024-2025 season

Becca A. Lewis (left) and Mark W. Soucy rehearsing this week for How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos by Maggie Kearnan at Boston Playwrights Theatre earlier.

Theatre

Boston Playwrights' Theatre Offers Prime Comeuppance for Amazon's Jeff Bezos

Wild satire by Maggie Kearnan and a drama by Tina Esper kick off BPT's 2024-2025 season

November 6, 2024
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Boston Playwrights' Theatre starts its 2024-2025 season by giving Amazon founder Jeff Bezos a very, very rough time.

The gazillionaire becomes a target in How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos, a brutally funny satire by Maggie Kearnan (GRS'25) set in "a parallel now" and directed by Taylor Stark (CFA'25), opening November 7.

The play finds Bezos (Mark W. Soucy), sitting for an interview with reporter Cherry Beaumont (Becca A. Lewis) in part to talk about the "Bernie Law" (as in Vermont Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders), which limits personal wealth to $999,999,999.99. The real subject is the grotesque inequality in today's economy, and the interview is not what it seems in the beginning. Things began to spiral wildly…

"As soon as the ending was on the page, I was like, well, there's no going back now," Kearnan says with a smile.

The audience will also have the benefit of an onstage Fact Checker, played by Robbie Rodriguez (CFA'25), who separates fact from fiction while getting laughs as something of a human rim shot.

Taylor Stark (from left) directing actors Becca A. Lewis and Mark W. Soucy during rehearsal at Boston Playwrights Theatre with stage manager Jess Brennan

"I had in the early days intended for the play to be a two-hander," Kearnan says. "But there are some wild things about Jeffrey Bezos in this play that I am making up off the top of my head as a writer. And there are some wild things about Jeffrey Bezos that are absolutely true. And it is important to me that everyone knows the difference between what I have made up and what is absolutely true, especially when it comes to how much wealth he has."

Opening November 14 is Soft Star by Tina Esper (GRS'25), directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary (CFA'07). It stars Annika Bolton, Mairéad O'Neill (CFA'26), Jesse Kodama (CFA'25), and Kamran Bina (CFA'25) as two best friends and their husbands, whose circumstances-economic and personal-may pull them apart. It has more than a touch of magical realism, as one of the friends-Jane-has a special connection with the birds outside her house.

"I have actually brought a lot more magic into this play. And I love the contrast of what appears natural and also making the magic seem kind of natural," Esper says. "I let the audience tease out those two worlds. I like the overlap and I like the blurriness between them."

The two plays, produced in collaboration with the BU College of Fine Arts School of Theatre, constitute BPT's Fall Rep Festival, aka the front half of its 2024-2025 season. The Spring Rep Festival next February and March will feature The Fig Tree, and ThePhoenix, and The Desire to Be Reborn by Isabelle Fereshteh Sanatdar Stevens (GRS'25), a tale of two young people in revolutionary Iran, and The Recursion of a Moth by Brandon Zang (GRS'25), a time-travel story.

How lives can be divided and dreams cut short

In Kearnan's play, Bezos may pay a heavy price for violating the Bernie Law.

"With most of my work I've got big questions, things that are weighing on my shoulders and living in my lower back, about the way that the world is structured and why," Kearnan says. "And the best way for me to get to the bottom of these questions about capitalism and the frustrations of a young millennial in the post-pandemic 2024 era is just excavating those feelings and questions and frustrations.

"Also, trying to get to the bottom of this actual person who I just do not feel that I can relate to in pretty much any capacity," she says.

That leads to some pretty extreme situations in Mr. Bezos.

"I am only just coming down from being scared of this play," Kearnan says. "I've just been trying to throw my worries out the window and stick with this idea of, what do American audiences need now? What do people want to talk about? What will spark conversation?"

I am only just coming down from being scared of this play.
Maggie Kearnan

"I wrote the ending and just went for it," she says. "As soon as I decided to do that, it became very clear that that had to be what the play was."

Soft Star is a prequel to Esper's Neighbor Jane, part of a trilogy that also includes State of Maine. The play explores the origin story of why Jane ends up where she is at age 72.

"I knew I needed to write a prequel, and I didn't know what it was going to be about," Esper says. "Two summers ago, I was at the New Harmony Project in Indiana, and two actors were reading a scene from State of Maine. And what was really happening in these two actors' lives became the inspiration. These two women were having a lot of trouble getting pregnant, and they connected over that. And it kind of sparked that moment for me, how sometimes friendships happen because of a loss or a shared desire.

"New Harmony has this labyrinth that the playwrights walk. It's supposed to help," Esper says. "You ask a question, and then you walk the labyrinth. So I asked the question, what will my prequel be? This is a play about two very good friends, and it centers on trying to get pregnant."

Despite their wildly different tone, How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos and Soft Star are in conversation with each other.

"It's the challenges of economics," Esper says. "I think both of these plays address that and how lives can be divided and dreams can be cut short. How people dream differently based on their economic class, their social class. In my play, the trajectory of these two couples is so entirely different. One couple knows that they can afford fertility treatment in 1980. And the other couple understands that that's just not even part of what they can begin to imagine."

She adds, "Both of these plays are dystopian in many ways and also hopeful. It's like, how do you take the power back?"

As usual with BPT, the playwrights are all part of BU's MFA in Playwriting program. This season's writers arrived at BU just as program director Nathan Alan Davis was beginning his tenure in 2022, the same time as BPT artistic director Megan Sandberg-Zakian.

"These four playwrights, the first to go through the program with Davis, are poised to become important new voices in the American theater," Sandberg-Zakian says. "Presenting their work in this festive format emphasizes our desire to celebrate that."

BPT will also present a staged reading of Trust by Ginger Lazarus (GRS'03) as part of her Jack Welch Developmental Residency, which gives BU alumni playwrights 30 hours of development time to shape their play-in-progress and share it in a public reading.

The BPT season closes in May with Boston Theater Marathon XXVII, the annual all-day production of new 10-minute plays chosen from submissions from New England playwrights, and produced by New England theater companies. The annual event benefits the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, which provides financial relief to individual theater practitioners in Greater Boston and which made a key impact during the pandemic.

All of this season's activity is featured on a recently launched, new and improved BostonPlaywrights.org.

How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos plays November 7 to 9, 16 to 18, 21, 23, and 24. Soft Star plays November 14 to 17, 19, 20, and 22 to 24. Both are on the Kate Snodgrass Stage at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Avenue. A Fall Rep Festival Pass to both plays is $50. Single tickets: adults, $40; BU faculty/staff, $25; seniors-62+, $25; students with valid ID, $10; Boston University student rush, $0 (Box Office, day-of-performance only). Pay-What-You-Want shows are November 7 (7 pm) and 8 (8 pm) and November 14 and 15 (8 pm). Purchase tickets via https://www.bostonplaywrights.org.

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  • Joel Brown

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    Joel Brown is a staff writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. He's written more than 700 stories for the Boston Globe and has also written for the Boston Herald and the Greenfield Recorder. Profile

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