Director Shamus (left) and playwright J. C. Pankratz on the set of Pankratz’s dark comedy Eat Your Young at Boston Playwrights Theatre.

Theater at BU

Curtain’s Up on Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s 2022-2023 Season

Wilderness therapy goes awry in dark comedy Eat Your Young

You can get an idea how playwright J. C. Pankratz feels about wilderness therapy for “troubled” teenagers by the title of their new play: Eat Your Young.

“As someone who is queer, who’s nonbinary, who’s trans, I think of my community as having more of a radar for institutions that are based on homogenizing people, like with conversion therapy,”  says Pankratz (GRS’23), who uses they/them pronouns.

The play opens the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre 2022-2023 season Thursday, October 6, and runs Fridays to Sundays through October 16. (More on the season below.)

But Eat Your Young isn’t a polemic against conversion therapy or even a thriller about escaping a fresh-air gulag. It’s a supernatural dark comedy following nonbinary 14-year-old Quinn’s efforts to survive a deep-woods experience with three other disaffected teens and two mildly wacko counselors. 

The play includes broad comedy and genuinely affecting struggles with gender and identity. Oh, and there’s also a forest monster…

“I think of it as a version of magical realism,” says Pankratz. “The thing that I love feeling most in a theater, like as an audience member, is I love feeling surprised. And so when I’m writing a play, I like to think of ways something really impossible can happen.

“When I’m sitting alone in my room with my computer, I’m trying to think of things that delight me and make me laugh and make me lean in, and make me really wanna see what’s at the end of this, whether it’s an argument or someone getting eaten by a monster.”

Pankratz grew up in deep-red Indiana, but the play isn’t based on personal experience. During 2020, they followed a social media saga revealing that a prominent queer athlete was working for a wilderness therapy program. They began to read about the whole concept and its use as an alternative to institutionalization or juvenile detention.

“I was watching people who had survived some of these institutions try to educate, or really just trying to communicate the harm it has caused to them. I think was what really made that stick in my mind,” Pankratz says.

In Eat Your Young, “Benadryl enjoyer” Quinn (Maez Gordon, CFA’23) arrives uneasily at the New Frontiers woods encampment, escorted by counselor Marty (Ross Beschler). There Quinn meets older campers Lucia (Abacus Dean-Polacheck, CFA’24), Jelly (Charlotte Stowe), and Ginger (Sunny Feldman), along with co-counselor Marty B (Jay Eddy, GRS’23), a former camper who is not Marty’s biggest fan.

The counselors talk about pulling your own weight, maintaining the “group agreements” on behavior, and the salubrious effects of being in the great outdoors, away from screens and social media, Adderall, and junk food.

But the teens have little patience for the Martys or their rules or “sharing stuff” about feelings. Quinn wants to pull a runner, and the others have their own ways of rebelling. But there’s also something primal underfoot in the forest that even the campers fear…

Lucia is trans and nonbinary, Jelly is a trans girl, and Ginger is cis. Each of them has something to teach Quinn about navigating life and stupid New Frontiers rules. Pancratz’s script includes casting notes requiring actors with similar identities, as well as racial diversity.  

Mono-monikered director Shamus (CFA’23) says it was generally easy to fulfill Pankratz’s requirements.

“We had a pretty wide and deep pool of options and talent in this. I’m really excited about where we landed,” says Shamus, a master’s student in directing. “Something that was really powerful in the audition and casting process was the amount of people that came in saying, ‘I’ve never been asked to read for a role I identify with before.’ That had a big impact, recognizing the importance of telling these stories.”

That casting also aligns with the message of the play.

“Imagining that who you are can change to align your external and your internal self, I think it truly means that imagination and survival and being alive are all really intertwined,” Pankratz says. “Because of my particular experiences as a queer person or a trans person, that’s how I come into that understanding. And I really respect that power, it’s what gives me joy.

“I think it’s like this thing that ultimately will end up saving us. That’s what happens when we have the power to see a future that we don’t, we can’t, see now. That’s what makes humans human. It’s what makes us able to change, able to change our environment and change our communities, or bring them along with us.”

Eat Your Young is just the start

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre is the producing arm of the University’s Playwriting Program, and this season will stage four other thesis plays by current students in addition to Pankratz.

The umlaut-rich Sävë thë Whälës (November 3-13), by David L. Caruso (GRS’23), is an environmental comedy that follows two Americans and two Canadians on a tour of the last glacier on Earth. OTP (December 8-18), by Elise Wien (GRS’23), involves 15-year-old best friends Ceci and Michelle and their internet adventures, examining fan fiction and political engagement. Jado Jehad (February 16-26, 2023) by Fatima A. Maan (GRS’23), is a family play about three generations of Pakistani women.

Eddy, the actor who plays Marty B in Eat Your Young, is also a playwriting student, and Eddy’s play-with-music Alligator-a-Phobia in 3D! (April 6-16, 2023) is also being directed by Shamus. BPT describes it as “a door farce/monster movie mashup about obsession and isolation—an absurd horror-comedy,” with plenty of singing and dancing, and apparently, chomping.

“I am thrilled that I get to produce these five extraordinary new works in my first season at BPT,” new artistic director Megan Sandberg-Zakian says. She took over in August from longtime playwriting program head Kate Snodgrass (GRS’90), who chose this season’s plays before retiring in June.

Though the plays are wildly—and we do mean wildly—diverse, a couple of questions reverberate throughout, Sandberg-Zakian says. “This group of writers—whose entire graduate education has taken place during a global pandemic—offers us critical reflections on the big questions of this moment,” she says. “‘How do we live when we feel like the world is ending?’ and ‘If our very survival depends on resisting old ideas and seeding new ones, what stories must we tell—and how?’”

The plays are coproduced with the BU College of Fine Arts School of Theatre as part of its New Play Initiative.