OUR HISTORY

Founded in 1981 by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre is an award-winning professional theatre producing new plays by living writers.

Notable Accomplishements

The Boston Theatre Marathon, BPT’s flagship short play festival now in its 27th year, received a Special Citation from the Elliot Norton Committee in 2000 for “enlivening local theatre through the annual showcase of short plays at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre."

Kate Snodgrass, Artistic Director Emerita, who served as BPT’s AD for 35 years, received the StageSource Theatre Hero Award in 2001, and the Boston Theatre Critics' Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence in 2012.

Nationally Recognizable Plays first produced at BPT

  • Laughs In Spanish by Alexis Scheer, which had its first production at BPT in 2019, has since been performed around the country, including at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Hartford Stage, Stages Houston, and TheatreSquared in Arkansas.

  • The Honey Trap by Leo McGann had its first production at BPT in 2017 and later had an acclaimed production by Solas Nua Theatre in association with the Kennedy Center, Washington DC, 2023, winning three Helen Hayes Awards.

  • Memorial by Livian Yeh, first produced by BPT in 2016, was produced by Pan Asian Repertory in NYC in 2023 and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.

  • The Sins of Sor Juana by Karen Zacarias, first produced by BPT in 1998, has been produced around the country. A revised version was presented by the Goodman Theatre in 2011 and is published by Dramatic Publishing.

Awards for BPT Productions (selected list)

  • 2024 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance (Jay Eddy, Driving in Circles by Jay Eddy)

  • 2020 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance (Billy Meleady, The Smuggler by Ronan Noone)

  • 2018 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actor, Small or Fringe Theatre (Barlow Adamson, Elemeno Pea by Molly Smith Metzler)

  • 2017 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress, Small or Fringe Theatre (Maureen Keiller, The Honey Trap by Leo McGann)

  • 2014 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script (Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer)

  • 2014 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actor, Small or Fringe Theatre (Alex Pollock, Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer)

  • 2014 IRNE Award for Best New Play, Small/Fringe Company (Windowmen by Steven Barkhimer)

  • 2009 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script (The Oil Thief by Joyce Van Dyke)

  • 2009 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actor, Small/Midsize Company (Will Lyman, The Oil Thief by Joyce Van Dyke)

  • 2007 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director, Small/Fringe Company (Jon Lipsky, King of the Jews by Leslie Epstein)

  • 2005 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Set Design, Small Company (Richard Chambers, The Glider by Kate Snodgrass)

  • 2004 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actor, Small Company (Vincent E. Siders, Monticel’ by Russell Lees)

  • 2003 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script (The Blowin of Baile Gall by Ronán Noone)

  • 2003 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Set Design, Small Company (Richard Chambers, The Blowin of Baile Gall by Ronán Noone)

  • 2003 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actor, Small Company (Billy Meleady, The Blowin of Baile Gall by Ronan Noone)

OUR FOUNDERS

Derek Walcott (Founder)
Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930 – March 17, 2017) founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981 and was our first Artistic Director. A world-renowned poet and playwright, he was the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays, and he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain received an Obie Award for the most distinguished foreign play. His plays were produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, the Negro Ensemble Company, the American Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Guthrie Theatre, among others. His stage adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey was staged to sold-out London audiences by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993. Born in 1930 on the island of Saint Lucia in the West Indies, Walcott graduated from the University College of the West Indies.

In 1957, he received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study American drama and has continued to win numerous awards for his verse and drama, including an O’Neill Foundation-Wesleyan University Fellowship for Playwrights (1969), the Guggenheim Award (1977), the American Poetry Review Award (1979), the Welsh International Writer’s Prize (1980), the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (1988), and the W. H. Smith Prize (1991). Walcott was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 as the Little Carib Theatre Workshop. The Trinidad Theatre Workshop has grown into an internationally recognized repertory company based in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. They have toured the United States, and their Boston performances include the 1995 productions at the Boston University Theatre on Huntington Avenue of Walcott’s Elliot Norton Award–winning The Joker of Seville and Dream on Monkey Mountain. In 1981, when he began teaching poetry and playwriting at Boston University, with BU’s help and a portion of his MacArthur Foundation Award, Walcott established Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

Kate Snodgrass (Artistic Director Emerita)
Kate served as the Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and of the Elliot Norton Award-winning Boston Theater Marathon (which she co-founded) until 2022. She is Professor Emerita of the Practice of Playwriting at Boston University. Snodgrass is a former Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) National Chair of the Playwriting Program, a former vice president of StageSource, Inc., and a member of Actors’ Equity, A.F.T.R.A., and the Dramatists Guild.

A former playwriting fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company, Snodgrass is the author of the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award-winning and much-anthologized play Haiku. The play has been performed around the world and translated into German, Portuguese, and Gaelic, and the film Haiku premiered at the 1995 Boston Film Festival. Her play The Glider (BPT, 2004) was nominated for the National American Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award and won the 2005 IRNE Award for Best New Play.

Snodgrass’s play Observatory (BPT, 1999) was the winner of an IRNE Award for Best New Play, the 1998 Provincetown Theatre Company’s Playwriting Award Competition, and the Best Play Award at the 2000 Southeastern Theatre Conference. Snodgrass was a member of the former Circle Repertory Theatre Lab. Her short plays L’Air Des Alpes, Que Sera, Sera, Critics’ Circle, and Wasteland have been published/anthologized by Cedar Press, Dramatic Publishing Company, Bakers Plays, and Smith and Kraus, respectively. Her one-act plays Bark’s Dream and The Last Bark with Steven Barkhimer, directed by Melia Bensussen, were commissioned and produced by Sleeping Weazel Theatre Company (2015, 2016).

Snodgrass has taught at Wellesley College, Brandeis University, MIT, The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, Suffolk University and Lesley University, among others. A Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, she holds two BA degrees from Kansas University and Wichita State University, respectively, and a masters degree in creative writing from Boston University. Snodgrass was the recipient of the Leonides A. Nickole Theatre Educator of the Year Award from the New England Theater Conference (2008), and the first recipient of the Milan Stitt Award for Outstanding Teacher of Playwriting from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (2010). She was StageSource’s 2001 “Theatre Hero” and the recipient of the 2012 Boston Theatre Critics’ Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence. In 2015, she was awarded a Tanne Foundation grant for her passion and commitment to the theatre. Snodgrass accepted The Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education at Boston University in 2019.