Setting, Place, and Belonging in Boston Theater: Actor's Shakespeare Project's Gem of the Ocean

Theater as Witness: Weighting the Wait

This week on Scene in Boston, we talk with director Dev Luthra about Weighting the Wait, Open Theater Project's new production created from writing circles with mothers impacted by gun violence. Performed inside St. John's Episcopal Church in Jamaica Plain, the production uses movement, storytelling, ritual, and large-scale fabric artwork to transform the audience from observers into witnesses. In our conversation, Dev discusses: • building theater from lived experience • storytelling as a form of connection and healing • the relationship between audience and performer • performing inside a sanctuary space • and what it means to "help carry the weight of tragedy" through community and art

Inside the Making of (Re)Dressing Miss Havisham: Miranda Jonté on solo performance, literary adaptation, and Boston Playwrights Theatre's new play incubator

In this episode of Scene in Boston, hosts Laura Amico and Lisa Thalhamer are joined by actor Miranda Jonté, who stars in (Re)Dressing Miss Havisham at Boston Playwrights' Theatre. The new solo play, written by John Minigan, reexamines the iconic Great Expectations character from her own perspective — asking what happens when women written off by literature get to tell their own stories. Jonté talks about collaborating with Minigan, building a one-woman performance, blending literary analysis with detective work, and why the play pushes back against familiar narratives about aging, heartbreak, and women's lives. Along the way, Laura and Lisa connect the production to other shows this season, including Gem of the Ocean, Penelope, The Outsiders, and this season's ongoing interest in revisiting classic stories through contemporary eyes. You can find tickets, show notes, and Boston-area theater listings at SceneInBoston.org.

Drawn to the Water: Swept Away and how Boston Stages Stories of Life at Sea

In this episode of Scene in Boston, hosts Laura Amico and Lisa Thalhamer dive into Swept Away, SpeakEasy Stage Company's folk-rock musical set on an 1888 whaling ship leaving New Bedford. Featuring the music of The Avett Brothers, the show follows four survivors of a shipwreck as they confront questions of morality, mortality, and what it means to live a good life. Director Jeremy Johnson and scenic designer Janie E. Howland join the hosts at Boston Arts Academy to unpack how this production brings the ocean to the stage. Johnson explains why The Avett Brothers' introspective, story-driven songs translate so powerfully to theater, turning a 90-minute, no-intermission musical into an emotionally rich journey through brotherhood, faith, and the ethics of survival. Howland discusses designing a world that is "pretty much at sea," using scale, sky, and lighting to evoke vastness rather than literal water. Zooming out, the episode situates Swept Away within a broader wave of current productions that center male and non-binary ensembles and more vulnerable depictions of masculinity. Johnson reflects on how this and other recent works challenge harmful models of "toughness" by showing men as tender, emotionally open, and spiritually searching. Laura and Lisa connect the show to other Boston productions and to a wider fascination with water onstage — from rain effects to illusionistic stagecraft — that continues to captivate audiences. The hosts close with recommendations for local theater, museum exhibits, and regional history that deepen the experience of seeing Swept Away, inviting listeners to engage with Boston's thriving arts ecosystem.

Inside the Making of a New Play: Girl Crime, Lifted, The Outsiders, and more

Hosts Laura Amico and Lisa Thalhamer step inside the process of writing new plays—how stories move from idea to page to stage, and what it takes to build something that doesn't yet exist. They talk with Boston playwrights about shaping characters, navigating collaboration, and developing work in real time, as scripts evolve through workshops, rehearsals, and conversation with artists and audiences. The discussion opens up the often-invisible work behind new theater: revision, risk, and the challenge of writing something that feels urgent and alive. Along the way, Laura and Lisa connect these conversations to the broader landscape of new work in Boston, exploring how plays are developed across institutions and what it means to create theater that speaks to this moment—and to the audiences it hopes to reach. Also Mentioned: Lifted, as part of the Ufot Family Cycle The Outsiders Beauty and the Beast Charlotte's Web Little Women Pride and Prejudice The Odyssey The Moderate When Playwrights Kill Black Swan Weighting the Weight The Secret Sharer

Setting, Place, and Belonging in Boston Theater: Actor's Shakespeare Project's Gem of the Ocean

In this episode of Scene in Boston, hosts Laura Amico and Lisa Thalhamer sit down with award-winning actor and educator Kadahj Bennett ahead of his role as Caesar Wilkes in August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, produced this spring by Actors Shakespeare Project. The episode is a deep dive into why Wilson's work feels urgently alive right now, and what happens when theater meets the community it's speaking to. Kadahj — who chairs the theater department at Boston Arts Academy and has performed at the Huntington, Speakeasy Stage, and ART — unpacks the themes that make Gem of the Ocean feel startlingly present today: wealth disparity, extrajudicial violence, the meaning of freedom, and the ways women are the backbone of their communities and yet still pushed to the margins. The conversation also explores the structure of Wilson's ten-play American Century Cycle, the show-by-show excitement audiences felt when those plays were first being released, and why Aunt Esther — one of Wilson's most mythic characters — makes her first chronological appearance here.