Alum’s Play Plays Bankruptcy for Laughs

Riding the Wave.com opens at BPT

By Robin Berghaus

While working as a teacher in New York City in 1998, Jonathan Mirin (GRS’03) got a stock tip from a friend: “Wave Systems,” he was told, “is selling for a dollar a share. In a few years, it will sell for $500 a share.”

Mirin, who would later graduate from BU’s Creative Writing Program, believed what he heard. He bought the stock, using credit cards to pay for it. And while that investment led directly to bankruptcy court, it eventually did pay off, in the form of an autobiographical one-man play written and performed by Mirin.

Riding the Wave.com, first produced in 2003 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, premiered at the New York Fringe Festival in 2004. Now, produced by Mirin’s own Piti Theatre Company, it’s back at the Playwrights’ Theatre, where it is playing through January 20. Mirin’s entertaining monologue takes his audience from his personal investment woes in New York to meditation centers in the Swiss Alps and Katmandu, where he meets his future wife, Godelieve, and realizes that “meditation should not be used as a way of hiding, but instead for facing what you are.”

These days, according to Mirin, he no longer invests in stocks. “I’m not allowed,” he says, “because I want to stay married, and that’s a condition.”

Riding the Wave.com is playing through January 20 at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday, January 17, through Saturday, January 19, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 20. Tickets can be purchased online, by phone at 866-811-4111, or an hour prior to each performance at the theater box office.

Additional video footage of Riding the Wave.com courtesy of Jonathan Mirin and Zach Stuart. Music provided by Haddon Kime.

Robin Berghaus can be reached at berghaus@bu.edu.

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