Thank you for joining us for Kill the Magistrate—scroll down for some great photos of the event from Jake Belcher Photography!
Kill the Magistrate by Abbey Fenbert (MFA 2015)
Directed by Courtney Elkin Mohler
On a moonlit autumn night circa 1600-something, six women gather in the woods of an unnamed New England town to plot the murder of their local magistrate. But as the night wears on, the trees seem determined to deliver messages and strange objects fall from the sky—and the conspirators’ varying reasons for wanting the magistrate dead start to threaten their alliance. This energetic, heightened, time-bending new play asks the age-old question: when you violently overthrow the patriarchy, how do you avoid replacing it with something worse?
Thanks to the support of tireless Boston theater champion Jack Welch, this residency gives BU alumni writers 30 hours of development time to explore, evolve, and experiment with collaborators. The playwright workshops their play-in-progress and shares it in a public reading. We hope you’ll join us on Dec. 4, and that you’ll stick around post-show to raise a cozy, hot beverage to this new play!
Featuring Kortney Adams*, Annika Burley, Eliza Fichter, Sage Gunning, Sarah Newhouse*, and Kaili Y. Turner. Stage Manager: Fanni Horvath*
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Want to know more? Read some of the resources Kill the Magistrate playwright Abbey Fenbert consulted over the course of her writing. Kill the Magistrate is on Broadway World!
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ABBEY FENBERT is a writer from Detroit, though her other homes include New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Ukraine. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Boston University and a BA from NYU. Her original plays have been produced and developed by the Matrix Theatre Company, Red Theatre Chicago, Northern Illinois University, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, the KNOW Theatre, the Berkshire Playwrights’ Lab, the Vagrancy, the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis and the Playwrights Union of Los Angeles.
Her plays Sickle and Child were finalists for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and her short dramatic works are published in anthologies from Smith and Kraus. Her writing has been featured online at The Toast, McSweeney’s, Catapult, The Offing, HowlRound and American Theatre. She also wrote and stars in the webseries Beck & Clem, a feminist time-travel comedy. Fenbert served in the Peace Corps, Ukraine, 2008-2011, where she worked as an English teacher and youth organizer.
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As a stage director and dramaturg, COURTNEY ELKIN MOHLER concentrates on new works that push aesthetic and political boundaries aimed to affect a more equitable world and is dedicated to supporting new work by Native American playwrights. Recent directing credits include An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen and The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe at Butler Universtiy’s Lilly Studio Theatre, and the pre-premiere of Larissa Fast Horse’s What Would Crazy Horse Do? at Santa Clara University’s Fess Parker Theatre. Recent dramaturgy credits include Desert Stories for Lost Girls by Lily Rushing at Latino Theater Company in Los Angeles, Lying with Badgers by Jason Grasl (Blackfeet) at Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles, The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota) at Virginia Stage Company, and Yu-Che-Wah-Kehn (Bitter) by Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora), recipient of the National New Play Network’s Smith Prize for Political Theatre. In addition to her professional theater work, Dr. Mohler is Associate Professor of Theatre at Boston College where she teaches critical theater studies, dramaturgy, and directing. Her co-authored Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury-Metheun Press.
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* Member, Actors’ Equity Association
