The Boston Theater Marathon XVI, Produced by The Boston Playwright's Theatre
The most unique theater experience of the year, and best bang for your buck, the 16th Annual Boston Theater Marathon…Sunday, May 11, 2014
WHAT
53 ten-minute plays, by 55 New England playwrights, produced by 54 New England theatres…in ten hours
WHERE
Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston
WHEN
Begins at noon and wrap up promptly at 10 p.m., with a party to follow.
WHO
Hundreds of New England actors; dozens of directors, technicians; volunteers; and you.
HOW
Several hundred plays have been submitted from writers from New England, fifty are chosen by a panel of readers.
BONUS
The Boston Theater Marathon will include The Warm-Up Laps on May 10 featuring three staged readings. These readings are free and open to the public.
COST
Your all-day pass ($25 in advance; $35 the day of the event) allows you to come and go as you please. The tickets are general admission.
BENEFICIARIES
As always, net proceeds from ticket sales to the BTM benefit the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, which provides financial support to theaters and theater artists in times of need.
OTHER STUFF TO KNOW
• The Calderwood Pavilion Theater has the most comfy seats in town, clear sight lines, and stellar production capabilities.
• Range of play’s subject matter: love in its innumerable forms; friendship; history; personality disorders; guilt; coming of age; boomers coming to terms with mortality; and the occasional over the top politically incorrect sketch, among many other themes.
• Hilarious plays, poignant plays, absurd plays, plays with hardly any dialogue, plays full of dialogue, plays that give you a lump in your throat, plays that make you laugh out loud, plays that make you think, the occasional one that makes you cringe. Not every play will pull you in. Some will knock your socks off.
• This is bare bones theater. It is astonishing how two or three actors and two or three props, can engage our imaginations
• Take a bag lunch, nothing that crinkles though, and a drink. I have two friends, dedicated theater goers, who’ve been to every BTM, arrive shortly before noon, sit in the same seats every year, sort of like season ticket holders at a Sox game, are there for the duration, bag lunches and all.
• The tickets allow you to leave and return to the theater all day long. Take a coffee break and you miss ten plays. So what, you can see forty more.
• Up and comers: chances are you’ll see a few actors whose names will light up the theater scene in the coming years.
ADVICE FROM A PRO (from my post http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2011/05/the-boston-theater-marathon-50-plays-in-10-hours-this-sunday-may-22-2011.html)
If you’re like my friend Ann Baker (formerly known as “The Queen of Casting” in Boston), you get the most brilliant bang for your buck. She packs a lunch, arrives before noon to secure her annual perch in the back row, in a seat near her pal Jack (who is one of the "readers" in the BTM play selection process), and stays for the whole shooting match. Cost? Fifty cents a play.
Ann knows theater. I asked her for a little ‘guide’ to help me get a handle on what feels like a Niagara Falls of plays spilling out one after the other. “The Marathon is a mix of sketches and plays,” Ann said. “A sketch/skit is situational. A play is character driven.”
“In a sketch/skit, it is the action, the situation, and little or nothing to do with the actors involved. There is no change, growth, or development of any kind that takes place with the actors in a sketch/ skit. The actors simply react to the action taking place. After the action ends, they go right back to who they are. They are the same character at the end of the action as they were in the beginning.”
“In a play, there is a beginning, middle, and an end… exposition, climax, resolution. There should be a change in the development of the character or a change in the degree of the character's being. For example - the shy character may come out of his/her shell, or become more shy, or become a raving lunatic. Something happens to the characters that alter their being by some degree. The thing that happens might be as little as a tone of voice of another character - which changes everything.”
Let’s say you can only spend two hours at the theater on Sunday. You’ll see a dozen plays. Even at the day/of price of $35, that's $2.91 per play. You might end up calling the friends you were supposed to have dinner with to tell them to pack a sandwich and come down to the theater.
If I hadn't planned months ago to be in San Diego dancing at Gator By The Bay, I'd be there with a bag lunch. If you go, tell me what I missed. I can take it.
pt review from 2010
Boston Playwright Theatre's archives of BTM I-XV
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