By Phil Berman, Playwright #6 

It was the summer of 2011 and I could all but keep my head above water. With a steaming pile of student loans, an ambitious professional dramaturgy gig coupled with a local company’s literary management, a new relationship to navigate, and (compounding the water metaphor) a day job narrating boat cruises of historic Boston harbor, I had a lot on my fresh college graduate plate. Oh yeah, and writing. Between harbor tours and rehearsals downtown, I’d often pause on the Rose Kennedy Greenway before heading into the T at rush hour to count my tips and cram as many filched peanut butter crackers into my mouth as possible.

As the seasons changed, my high-sodium moments of zen were frequently interrupted by parades of painted cardboard, sharpie markers, makeshift drums, and ebullient chanting sliding their way down Atlantic Avenue. Occupy Wall Street was born on September 17, 2011, with the Boston demonstration settling in Dewey Square less than two weeks later. At the time, the whole point of the movement escaped me: Hazy media representation combined with my lack of free time and total focus to the show I was turging left me underinformed and disengaged.

“I have a theater arts degree and I managed to find a job out of college! What are you all so upset about?” I thought to myself as I dashed home through South Station. With vague impressions of the housing crisis, corporate corruption, and class inequality, I passed over the movement with equally low portions of understanding and sympathy. When Occupy Boston was evicted early in December, I felt only a passing twinge of regret that I hadn’t been a part of it.

I’d all but forgotten about Occupy until my next dramaturgy project, Danny Bryck’s tour-de-force one-man docuplay, NO ROOM FOR WISHING, directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. Composed of Danny’s painstakingly transcribed interviews of Dewey Square Occupiers, the protestors and I were now confessing, laughing, wrestling, singing, and working together in the same room night after night. Between my own research, Danny’s hilarious and heart-wrenching primary source material, and the post-show anecdotes of Occupiers with whom we chatted over the course of the run, I came to understand Occupy’s unclouded message, which, in my outsider’s estimation, is this: An egalitarian society can exist anywhere, with all people, in any condition. Watch us do it. Occupy led by example in the face of not only the 1%, but also the 99% who pass the Occupiers every day, painting an alternative portrait of what a country focused on mutual success can be.

Despite this, the call for human equality in society at large fell on the deaf (or underfunded and understaffed) ears of not-for-profit (NFP) arts organizations. Occupy’s decisions are made at public General Assembly meetings where anyone’s voice can be heard; theatre companies operate behind closed doors. Occupiers work together without pay, but find ways to support each other’s livelihoods; arts groups continue to scale the pay of individual artists according to a measured level of contribution, if compensated for time at all beyond “the experience.” The People’s Mic gives voice and power to the parts of the whole; the theatre company’s power ultimately rests in the hands of high-ranking administrators, an artistic 1%. The arts thrive in an Occupy society that encourages and celebrates its citizens’ unique and individual music, visual art, film, photography, dance, design, puppetry, and theater, regardless of qualifications, prior experience, networking, or background; NFP arts seasons and the artists who create them are carefully curated to ensure a “high quality” artistic experience, shutting out generative artists whose aesthetic falls outside the popular market and the predetermined mission statements of established producing organizations.

In my time as a literary manager I read countless scripts: many were excellent and easily warranted a Boston production (including John Greiner-Ferris’s TURTLES) but were assessed in programming meetings as a “great play, but not for us.” These evaluations, while true to this company’s mission, and valid for the small amount of production slots and company resources, wore me down. What happens to these excellent plays? Where do they go and what audience sees them? How do these playwrights, who have already invested so much of their heart, thought, and time, witness these characters in action? Isn’t the strength of the writer’s primal impulse to create a new work reason enough to see it to fruition?

What’s so exquisite about 13P’s mission and revolutionary structure is its creation of guaranteed space for work to happen. The writer’s knowledge that they are putting their energy into a future living, breathing piece of art that can be developed in tandem with other theater artists is wildly valuable; the free informational tools they left behind to inspire similarly minded groups of writers is priceless.  Like Occupy, 13P’s spark began in New York and is spreading to urban centers around the US. Another playwright-driven producing org is thriving in DC.

When John and Kevin invited me to join Boston Public Works, I jumped at the opportunity to contribute to Boston’s sizable playwriting community, not just for the road to production BPW offers, but also for the demonstration of mutual success BPW illustrates. BPW supports not only our playwrights, but a diverse community of designers, dramaturgs, directors, actors, technicians, and other theater artists committed to the long-term development of ten plays because ten artists cared about them enough and about each other’s work to bring it into the world.

By staging plays free of literary gatekeepers, we aren’t the example—we are an example—to any other like-minded group of playwrights, invested enough in a thriving new play scene to make a bounty of new work happen the way it wants to happen.

Keeping your head above water by yourself is hard. As it turns out, with nine other playwrights in the water with you, it’s easy to stay afloat. 

If you walk away from Boston Public Works knowing one thing, it should be this: We are here for two reasons: 1) to change the way plays are developed and produced in Boston and, 2) make Boston a hotbed for new plays.

Boston Public Works is rooted in the observation that, if you are a playwright in Boston, you are swimming in a very small pond with a lot of fish. It’s extremely difficult to get a new work produced in this city simply because there are too few slots. The obvious solution, then, is for playwrights to make more slots. Bypass the traditional theater model and self-produce her or his own play. After all, it is a DIY world. Every conversation surrounding the skill set of the 21st century includes entrepreneurship and making your own opportunities. So, put the power of the production into the hands of the playwright. This solution is easy to reach, but once you’re at this point, something interesting happens.

There was this ah-ha! moment that occurred when we realized this is bigger than just producing our own plays. We realized that simply producing our own plays would not only be self-serving, but it also wouldn’t serve the greater community and solve the problem of too few slots. You have to make the larger number of slots permanent. This ah-ha! moment happened to 13P, who devised the model on which Boston Public Works is based. It also happened to The Welders, another group in Washington, D.C. who are also following 13P’s model. What needs to happen in Boston is the power of production needs to be permanently placed in the hands of all playwrights, radically changing the way plays are developed and produced, and when that happens a host of other changes will fall out for all theater artists in Boston.

Playwrights write because they have a burning desire to say something and want it to be heard. The motivation is present to self-produce, but for many reasons playwrights haven’t taken the step. Some are mired in the traditional model: Write a play, send it to as many theaters as they can, and wait to see if anyone “accepts” their play. They don’t know any other way. Many playwrights simply aren’t wired to understand or have the experience to know the business and organizational requirements of self-production. A roadmap needs to be charted—ground needs to be broken—for others to follow.  All it takes is for one group to show the way, to show what’s possible. One consistent observation by the playwrights in Boston Public Works is how empowered they feel, and how they no longer feel helpless when it comes to their art. The reason why they write in the first place—for their voice to be heard—is suddenly realized. They didn’t know the possibility was so close.

Boston Public Works goes beyond playwriting to encompass all Boston-based theater artists in the spirit of collaboration. We embrace actors, directors, designers, dramaturges, and technicians. New work excites theater artists. With new play development, they use their skills and talents to break new ground, too, and make their mark on the piece. The result is new work that bears the mark of the entire Boston-based theater community.

New play development at traditional theaters does exist in Boston, but with the number of playwrights in this city, there should be so much more. The Washington, D.C. theater community just announced that 44 new plays by women will be produced in 2015.  In Boston, a quarter of that number--10--by either gender would be news. New play development needs to happen in Boston because new plays are a neglected part of our city’s culture. It would be the same as if we let the buildings on Boylston Street decline, or the trees in the Public Gardens die. For the same reason we take pride in our city—and each one of us has a list of why we love our city and what we proudly show visitors, from the sports teams to the restaurants, Cambridge, the universities—you get the idea, Boston should come to mind in the national consciousness when it comes to new plays, very much in the same way that New York comes to mind when you think of established theater.

Moving forward, we hope everyone has an ah-ha! moment, and that collectively we can build a vibrant new play tradition in Boston. Our hope is that more groups like Boston Public Works are established in Boston. 

Turtles is a story about Bella and her two children, Foos and Finn, living in their broken-down car by the side of a highway where they’ve built a sort of home for themselves. Above them, a tattered billboard announces the coming of Jesus – with tomorrow’s date. When a man called Jesus does arrive, right on schedule, Bella has to decide whether he really is the Messiah, or just another man in a long line of disappointments. In the end, it's up to the audience, too, to decide if he really is the real Jesus. 

I wrote Turtles for so many reasons. Family and identity, two themes that are prominent in Turtles, mean a lot to me. Family isn't the traditional family anymore;  mine certainly isn't.  I wrote what family is like for me.  And I was raised in southern Ohio, oddly, a liminal place in the United States that acted as a crossroads during the westward expansion and the Great Migration. It's a place that's not North, South, East, or West, so some people--me, for instance--know a lot about having to stake out your spot in the world. 

I wrote the play because I wanted to write something that actually reflected the world I lived in--a play that I felt was relevant for the times. I am so tired of seeing plays that still focus on middle-class values.  The middle class is in tatters in the United States. The social structure in the United States is in transition and we, as artists, should acknowledge that. I'm not saying that Turtles portrays the way life is in the United States. That's journalism.  In the end, Turtles is simply a story about a woman trying to find her in the world. 

And I'm tired of going to plays in Boston and seeing predominantly white casts when there's no reason for the characters to be portrayed by white people, and when there are so many talented non-white actors in Boston. Turtles' cast is intentionally mulit-ethnic. 

And, I  wrote this play because there aren't enough strong female voices in the theater, and an actress challenged me to write a play with strong women. In Turtles there are five actresses playing multiple roles including the male roles. I wrote Turtles so women could express what it's like to be told by a man that you're no good, or the actresses could tell their story about being hit on because you have a flat tire by the side of the road and he perceives you as being helpless, and he'll fix your flat if you'll fix his. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) 

I'll be blogging more about Turtles. Please write with your comments and thoughts. We'd love to hear from you.