Faculty and Staff

DEREK WALCOTT
Founder

Founder and former Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Derek Walcott is a world-renowned poet and playwright and the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and plays. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain received an Obie Award for the most distinguished foreign play. His plays have been produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, the Negro Ensemble Company, the American Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Guthrie Theatre, among others. His stage adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey was staged to sold-out London audiences by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993. Born in 1930 on the island of Saint Lucia in the West Indies, Walcott graduated from the University College of the West Indies. In 1957, he received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study American drama and has continue to win numerous awards for his verse and drama, including an O’Neill Foundation-Wesleyan University Fellowship for Playwrights (1969), the Guggenheim Award (1977), the American Poetry Review Award (1979), the Welsh International Writer’s Prize (1980), the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (1988), and the W.H. Smith Prize (1991). Walcott was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981. Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 as the Little Carib Theatre Workshop. The Trinidad Theatre workshop has grown into an internationally recognized repertory company based in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. They have toured the United States, and their Boston performances include the 1995 productions at the Boston University Theatre on Huntington Avenue of Walcott’s Elliot Norton Award-winning The Joker of Seville and Dream on Monkey Mountain. In 1981, when he began teaching poetry and playwriting at Boston University, with BU’s help and a portion of his MacArthur Foundation Award, Walcott established Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. Walcott continues to gives readings and lectures throughout the world.

KATE SNODGRASS
Artistic Director, Professor of Playwriting

Kate Snodgrass is the Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights' Theatre and of the Elliot Norton Award-winning Boston Theater Marathon (which she also co-founded). She is a Professor in Playwriting at the renowned Graduate Creative Writing Department of Boston University. Kate is a former Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Chair of the National Playwriting Program, a former Vice President of StageSource, Inc., and a member of Actors' Equity, A.F.T.R.A., and the Dramatists' Guild. She is the 2001 recipient of the “Theatre Hero” Award from StageSource in Boston. She is a Stanford Calderwood Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company.

Her most recent play, The Glider, premiered at Boston Playwrights' Theatre in Oct./Nov. 2004 to excellent reviews; the play was nominated for the National American Critics Association's "Steinberg New Play Award" and was the 2005 IRNE award-winner for "Best New Play--Small Company." Snodgrass is the author of the Actors' Theatre of Louisville's Heideman Award-winning and much-anthologized play Haiku. The play has been performed around the world and translated into German, Portuguese, and Gaelic, and the film “Haiku” premiered at the 1995 Boston Film Festival. Snodgrass's play Observatory Conditions, produced by Boston Playwrights‚ Theatre in 1999, was the winner of an IRNE Award for "Best New Play", the 1998 Provincetown Theatre Company's Playwriting Award Competition, and the "Best Play Award" at the 2000 Southeast Theatre Conference. Snodgrass was a member of the former Circle Repertory Theatre Lab. Her short plays L’Air Des Alpes, Que Sera, Sera, and Critics’ Circle have been published/anthologized by Cedar Press, Dramatic Publishing Company, and Bakers Plays, respectively, and have been performed all over the United States.

As an actor, Snodgrass studied at Kansas University, The Wichita State University, The London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and in NYC with disciples of Michael Chekhov and Sanford Meisner. She has appeared at Lincoln Center, in regional theatres, and on national television. Her directing credits at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre include Blackout and Prayin’ Hands by Tom McClellan, Michael Moss’s Twosome, Kimberly Brown’s Re: Pirth, Karen Zacarias’s The Barechested Man, Joyce VanDyke’s Love in the Gulf, and Patricia Smith’s Life After Motown. Snodgrass has taught at the Harvard Extension School, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, M.I.T., and The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, among others. A Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, she holds two B.A. degrees from Kansas University and Wichita State University, respectively, and a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Boston University.

RICHARD SCHOTTER
Visiting Professor of Playwriting

Richard Schotter is the author of Medicine Show, Benya the King, The Wood Dancer and Taking Stock, which have been performed in New York, around the U.S., and in Europe. An opera based on The Wood Dancer (with music by Jerome Hughes) was performed at the Next Move Theatre in New York in 1996. Mr. Schotter has been an OBIE Award nominee and received a CAPS grant and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's Berman Playwriting Award (all for Benya the King). He is also a lyricist and an alumnus of the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. His short musical Duet for Shy People (music by Michael Kosarin) was performed at the 1999 Boston Theater Marathon and is included in the musical evening Plaisir d'Amour and Other Stories. Mr. Schotter has written a number of songs for the PBS children's series The Puzzle Place. He and composer Michael Kosarin recently completed a musical of Anne of Green Gables. He is currently working with composer Steve Horelick on a new full-length musical. Mr. Schotter has been a theatre critic, a Fulbright Scholar, and the Literary Manager of the American Place Theatre and holds a Ph. D. in Dramatic Literature from Columbia University. He is a Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, where he chairs the Creative Writing Program.

Melinda Lopez
Assistant Professor of Playwriting

Melinda Lopez is a playwright and actress, and was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a “promising new voice in American Theatre.” Her play Sonia Flew, which was developed and premiered by the Huntington Theatre Company, won the Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play and two IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Awards for Best Play and Best Production. It has subsequently been produced at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, Ariel Tepper’s Summer Play Festival (NY), the Milagro Theatre (Portland, OR), and the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The play has been broadcast on NPR’s “The Play’s The Thing!” in a production by L.A. Theatre Works with a cast that included Elizabeth Peña and Hector Elizondo. Most recently, her play Gary was produced at Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Play Festival in Chicago and, in March 2008, at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre where it was nominated for an Elliot Norton Award by the Boston Theatre Critics Association.

Ronan Noone
Assistant Professor of Playwriting

Ronan Noone won the Michael Kanin National Playwriting Award, a university competition that involved 1,200 productions and 20,000 students nationwide, with his The Lepers of Baile Baiste. The Lepers of Baile Baiste was then performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 2002, just as Ronan was completing his graduate work at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. That play and The Blowin of Baile Gall, the second play in his Irish trilogy, shared the 2002 IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Best New Play. In May 2003, he received the Boston Theatre Critics Association’s Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Play for The Blowin of Baile Gall, also nominated for the American Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award. His recent plays Brendan and The Atheist (starring Campbell Scott) were premiered at the Huntington Theatre Company in 2007, and in April 2008, Brendan was named Best New Play at the IRNE Awards. In June 2008, The Athiest (with Campbell Scott) opened at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Off Broadway in October 2008.

JACOB STRAUTMANN
Managing Director, Creative Writing teacher

Jacob Strautmann is Managing Director at Boston Playwrights' Theatre where he is actively involved in helping to run the Graduate Playwriting Program at Boston University. He also teaches an Introduction to Creative Writing class to BU undergraduates. Originally from West Virginia, where he received a BA in History and English from Wheeling Jesuit University, Jake has lived in Boston for seven years. He received an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University in 2000. Since then, he has called Boston Playwrights' Theatre his home. His poems have appeared in Perihelion Magazine, on Webdelsol, and in Agni Magazine Online. His one-act plays have been featured twice in the Boston Theater Marathon, and his one-act Roseby's Rock was produced by The Bridge Theatre Company. He is currently working on a full-length play, Upon Stony Places. He lives with his wife, poet Valerie Duff-Strautmann, daughter and son in Belmont, MA.

MARC OLIVERE
Production Manager, Lighting Designer

Marc Olivere is Production Manager at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, as well as a playwright, fiction writer, and lighting designer. His lighting design credits include West Side Story and Evita at the Seacoast Repertory in Portsmouth, The Man Who Came To Dinner, Sing for Your Supper, and Our Country’s Good at the Lyric Stage, Sweeney Todd at the Turtlelane Playhouse, and Falsettos at the Vineyard Playhouse in Martha’s Vineyard. At BPT, he designed Joyce Van Dyke’s A Girl’s War and Love in the Gulf, Kate Snodgrass’s Observatory, Melinda Lopez’s Scenes from a Bordello, Karmo Sanders’ Humpin’ Glory Bay, Karen Zacarías’s The Sins of Sor Juana and The Barechested Man (for which he also served as set designer), Sinan Ünel’s Single Lives, The Vorse House, and The Three of Cups, Kimberly Brown’s Re: Pirth, Payne Ratner’s Repossession, and Chapin Garner’s Confessions. When he’s not building a set, Marc is also responsible for bringing the Boston Theater Marathon in "on time."

MICHAEL DUNCAN SMITH
Marketing Coordinator

Michael Duncan Smith is the Marketing Coordinator at Boston Playwrights' Theatre. When not at BPT, Mike is an actor, having performed in dozens of productions including: As You Like It, Our Town, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Mike continues his work as an actor, director, and graphic designer. Mike recently began his Masters in Arts Adminstration here at Boston University. Mike lives in Watertown with his wife Amanda.