Kate Snodgrass and the Boston Playwright’s Theatre
When Kate Snodgrass came to BU to study fiction and playwriting in 1987, there was no playwriting program in which she could enroll. Instead, Snodgrass enrolled in a one-year, partially-funded MA program in Creative Writing. Today, BU boasts a three-year, fully-funded MFA program in Playwriting, lauded as one of the best in the nation and complemented by the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT), which exclusively produces student-written works. Snodgrass’s decision to stay on at BU to work with BPT founder Derek Walcott post-graduation was critical to this transformation.
At that time, Snodgrass already had twenty years of experience as an actor and director under her belt, but looking back on her career, Snodgrass remarks that, rather than a decision, staying at BU “was more like a calling.” Part of that calling was the drive to produce new work in a Boston theatre scene dominated by canonical works.
After decades as the Artistic Director of the Boston Playwright’s Theatre and Professor of the Practice of Playwriting, Snodgrass is retiring from her dual roles at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year. The miraculous transformation that BU’s MFA program in laywriting has undergone during her tenure is a testament to her visionary leadership and to the powerful impact of sustained institutional funding. The Center is proud to have supported BPT projects for the last twenty-four years.
When Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott founded Boston Playwright’s Theatre in 1981, he wanted to build a company that could bring new voices to the stage by producing new plays. Snodgrass began as BPT’s Producing Director, directing many of the company’s plays up until the late 1990s. At the time of its founding, the BPT had neither its own venue nor a reputation. It now has two black box theaters and a collection of reviews from the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. As the BPT grew, the playwriting program grew in turn.
Snodgrass continued to champion new works, and in 1999, she cofounded the Boston Theatre Marathon with playwright Bill Lattanzi. Snodgrass describes the BTM as “a call for producers to give new works and new voices a chance.” In that first year, local New England theatre companies produced a total of forty ten-minute plays.
At the time, BPT was the only theatre in Boston focused on new plays. Snodgrass recalls “waiting for the doors to open and thinking…What if no one shows up?” Luckily, her fears were unfounded. Originally featuring forty short plays, the BTM is now the largest ten-minute play festival in the world, producing fifty plays (selected from four hundred submissions) in an all-day theatre marathon. “Today, new plays are at the heart of what Boston theatre does, and I’d like to think we led the way to this,” says Snodgrass. Supported by the Center and by individual donors, the BTM has raised close to $200,000 for the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, which helps area artists in crisis.
While Snodgrass certainly takes pride in the program’s expansion and new productions, Snodgrass says that she is most proud of her loyal and committed staff and the MFA program’s impact on so many student writers: “I think we have made a difference in [these writers’] lives, and, therefore, in the lives of our audiences.”
Snodgrass’s retirement from BU will not mark the end of her involvement in the New England theatre scene. Snodgrass is thrilled to see her play, The Art of Burning, produced by the Huntington Theatre Company, Boston’s flagship professional theatre company, and by the Hartford Stage Company during the 2022-2023 season. And of course, the BPT and the MFA program will forever stand on her shoulders. After a search for a rightful successor, the Center welcomes award-winning playwright Nathan Alan Davis as the next Professor of the Practice of Playwriting.
