How to NOT Save the World with Mr. Bezos

November 7 – 24, 2024

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre starts its 2024-2025 season by giving Amazon founder Jeff Bezos a very, very rough time. In How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos, a brutally funny satire by Maggie Kearnan set in “a parallel now,” Bezos sits for an interview in the context of a law which limits personal wealth to $999,999,999.99. The real subject is the grotesque inequality in today’s economy, and the interview is not what it seems in the beginning. Things began to spiral wildly… “As soon as the ending was on the page, I was like, well, there’s no going back now,” writer Maggie Kearnan says with a smile.

Written by Kearnan (GRS’25) and directed by Taylor Stark (CFA’25), How NOT to Save the World with Mr. Bezos is produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Theatre.

“I had in the early days intended for the play to be a two-hander,” says Kearnan. “But there are some wild things about Jeffrey Bezos in this play that I am making up off the top of my head as a writer. And there are some wild things about Jeffrey Bezos that are absolutely true. And it is important to me that everyone knows the difference between what I have made up and what is absolutely true, especially when it comes to how much wealth he has.”

“I am only just coming down from being scared of this play,” Kearnan says. “I’ve just been trying to throw my worries out the window and stick with this idea of, what do American audiences need now? What do people want to talk about? What will spark conversation?”

The other half of the Fall 2024 rep at BPT is Soft Star by Tina Esper (GRS’25), about two best friends and their husbands, whose circumstances—economic and personal—may pull them apart. Despite their wildly different tone, How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos and Soft Star are in conversation with each other.

Says Kearnan: “both of these plays are dystopian in many ways and also hopeful. It’s like, how do you take the power back?”