Poe Returning to Boston

Stefanie Rocknak’s Poe Returning to Boston

In case you haven't seen the clay model of the new Edgar Allan Poe statue, to be installed in Poe Square this fall. Read more. Thanks Jake!

Winning trio

A trio of Boston KCACTF winners at last month's National Festival in Washington, D.C.: Rick Park (L) won the Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting for Gay Guy, Fat Girl; Lesley University's Lisa Kenner Grissom (C) won the National Ten-Minute Play Award for Tattoo You; and Michael Parsons (R) won the Rosa Parks and the John Cauble Playwriting Awards for his play Homeland and one-act The Lighthouse. All three of these fabulous writers also had short plays in last weekend's Boston Theater Marathon XV (including Lisa's winning play).

Voices of BTM XV: Lisa Burdick

Lisa Burdick

I was going to write a compare and contrast essay about what it’s like to participate in both Boston Marathons. In fact it was almost done. That was before. That essay is saved on my hard drive waiting for the right time to share it, perhaps next year. Perhaps the year after that. 

Instead I find myself thinking about what it means to participate in this year’s Boston Theater Marathon. It’s got those words in the title, Boston and Marathon. Those two words will forever be linked with the events of Monday, April 15th, 2013. We can’t escape it. It’s like having your birthday be September 11th. People will always pause. 

But this is our event, 50+ playwrights from New England, 50+ theater companies from Boston, 50+ directors, dozens of crew members, hundreds of actors, all Bostonians. I find myself thinking about art’s place in the world after a tragedy. Here in Boston we’ve had our sports teams to inspire us after a difficult week. But we also have our artists. Art can inspire and heal and bring people together. The Boston Theater Marathon brings the theater community together like no other event. It inspires us too. Perhaps this year it will even help heal us. This city has adopted the phrase “Boston Strong” as a rallying cry, a slogan to use as we pick ourselves up and show our resiliency. The theater community understands because when we keep going, when we pick ourselves up, when we show our resiliency, when we say “Boston Strong,” we’re just finding a new way to say “The Show Must Go On.”

--Lisa Burdick


We hope you’ll join us on Sunday, May 12 for Boston Theater Marathon XV (and for The Warm-Up Laps on May 11!). Click here for tickets and event details. See you there!

Still looking up

Today, I'm committed to doing whatever I can to help create a positive start to the new week. So I give you this: Alexis Scheer -- our intern last summer and a student at The Boston Conservatory -- put together this video of her fellow musical theatre students (and she's in there, too) singing Jason Mraz's I Won't Give Up as a tribute to the city where they live and learn. Good one.

Thank you Alexis and BoCo friends for raising your beautiful voices for all of us, and to Chris Webb for sharing this.

"The good outnumber you, and we always will"

Old South Church, "The Church of the Finish Line" (original art here)

“I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths. But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. … This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.