Please join Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and erbaluce for our Second Sunday Play Reading Series in the upstairs dining room of erbaluce. Every second Sunday of each month we read a new play by a local playwright, using professional actors from the Boston theatre community. The excellent (and FREE) hors d’oeuvres offered by Chef Charles Draghi are reason enough to be there, but these plays are still in flux and these talented playwrights welcome your smart feedback on what you’ve heard!

Please join us for our next event — April 13 at 7 p.m.… RECONSIDERING HANNA(H) Hanna, a brutally blunt international journalist, is struggling to come to terms with her husband’s violent death.  After accepting a seemingly tame assignment, she becomes increasingly obsessed with uncovering the history of another Hannah:  the infamous Hannah Dustin who was kidnapped by a Native American raiding party in 1697. Soon the individual stories of the two Hanna(h)s begin to merge into one portrait of a smart woman, torn from the only world she knows, who crosses the line between civilization and savagery.

YOU MUST RESERVE YOUR SEAT AT reservations@erbaluce-boston.com.

Fifty plays are chosen from more than 400 submissions from New England playwrights, and the selected plays are produced by New England theatre companies who donate their time to this fun all-day event. Generously supported over the years by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and by individual donations, the BTM gives net proceeds to the Theatre Community Benevolent Fund, an organization helping area theatre artists and companies in crisis. This weekend-long event also includes The Warm-Up Laps and The One-Minute Sprints on May 10!

Absence tells the story of 76-year-old Helen whose lapses in memory have not diminished her need to control her family, and as the family’s matriarch, she is used to getting her own way. But now Helen’s world is growing more chaotic by the minute, and she’s furious. No one seems to be taking it seriously. Even her doctors are turning a deaf ear. A surprising, theatrical, and deeply moving look at a family in crisis and at one woman’s struggle to survive in an ever-changing reality.

Fast-paced, coming-of-age comedy Windowmen centers on Kenny, a young man struggling to make ends meet in 1980s New York City. His new job at the Fulton Fish Market is complicated with some daunting demands, math puzzles, and some shady characters who want to hide some even shadier dealings with the cash register. The REAL Fulton Fish Market is lost to the ages, but she comes alive again in this exhilarating look at the lost world of Lower Manhattan long before gentrification and Homeland Security. Barkhimer, winner of the Kennedy Center’s National John Cauble Award, is a skilled caricaturist and his gifts are in rare form in this seriously comedic look at “fish.”

Inspired by Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Burning follows lesbian ex-Army sergeant Cy who uses a young soldier to profess her true feelings to the woman they both love. Fresh from the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military, Cy builds her own world of secrets and lies even as she battles a former adversary with far-ranging and tragic results. From the author of the wacky and wonderful Matter Familias, this witty, word-wise romance is also deeply passionate and hard-hitting. Burning will make you think twice before you keep quiet about injustice. And if you ever hesitated to speak your love, you won’t want to wait another minute.