Becca A. Lewis and Greg Maraio in a scene from Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s production of The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias (GRS’95), running through October 13. Photo by Stratton McCrady

Theatre

The Funny, Chaotic Book Club Play Opens Boston Playwrights’ Theatre 2019-2020 Season

BU alum Karen Zacarias’ comedy receives Boston premiere

Book clubs, as anyone who’s ever been in one knows, are about much more than just reading books: they’re about forging intimate connections and creating a sense of community. And when someone leaves a book club, or a new member arrives, it can be disruptive to the group.

In the sharply funny comedy The Book Club Play by playwright Karen Zacarias (GRS’95), now receiving its Boston premiere at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT), chaos ensues when a famous documentary filmmaker shows up to follow a coed book club over a period of months. As the members move from reading classics like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to potboilers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the vampire-themed romance Twilight, the filmmakers capture intimate aspects of their lives. The play celebrates the love of literature while exploring deeper issues. 

Zacarias, who has been in the same coed book club for 22 years, thought it might make good material for a play, she says, because “the idea of being in a room together and discussing things that are more about the human heart is something that happens very seldom.” Her book club members were supportive of the project—one even wrote a song for the play. 

Originally staged at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Md., in 2008, then at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, the play has subsequently been produced around the country.

Much of Book Club’s success can be attributed to how audiences connect with the characters. Zacarias says you don’t have to read books to identify with the men and women on stage: “I’ve had so many people come up and say, ‘I’m Jen or I’m this one, I’m that character there.’ I think the play hits a gentle nerve that resonates with people. I think it says something about loneliness and friendship that resonates with audiences today.”

Her work has been staged from La Jolla Playhouse to South Coast Repertory to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and from Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, making her one of the country’s most produced playwrights.  

Zacarias spent most of her early career writing dramas, many of them inspired by her Mexican heritage, like The Sins of Sor Juana, about the legendary poet and nun Juana Inés de la Cruz. Growing up, she always wanted to be a writer. As an undergrad at Stanford, she wrote a play that won some awards, but after graduation, she took a job with a Latin American policy nonprofit in Washington. She kept writing at night, but it wasn’t until she came to BU, she says, that she let herself become a writer.

The Book Club Play was Zacarias’ first foray into comedy, and she admits that it wasn’t easy.

“To try to write a comedy with substance, it’s hard,” she says. “A lot of comedies these days are either farces or they’re pretty dark comedies, so to write a full-hearted comedy with a lot of tiny, sharp teeth is a challenge.”

Zacarias wasn’t satisfied with early productions. “The audience helped educate me: the first version, some people loved it and then it alienated a lot of other people,” she says, “and that was not what I set out to do…so I had to go back and figure out why it was alienating some people.” 

Prior to productions at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati Playhouse, she did two major rewrites. All of the original characters remained intact, but she tinkered with problematic plot lines. “I had to do a number of changes and rewrites,” she says. “It took me a long time to get it to where I wanted it to go.” 

The result, says Kate Snodgrass (GRS’90), BPT artistic director, is a play that’s “funny and filled with playable and distinct characters who we all recognize.” Long a champion of Zacarias’ work, Snodgrass describes her as “devious and funny: what makes her funny is the veracity of her characters: we’ve all been there. What makes her devious is that she’s writing with an attitude about the important stuff. She’s got a message, but it’s hidden in the comedy. We come away having been roundly entertained, and then we start to ask ourselves, ‘What is at the heart of the story?’ The answer is always significant.” 

Newspaper headlines, stories told to her by friends, these serve as inspiration for the playwright’s work. When asked about her writing habits, she says that each play is different. “Sometimes I’ll write an entire play in one week, and sometimes I’ll squeak it out over years. It’s really about the inspiration and the deadline and whether or not it’s an adaptation.” 

The BPT production of The Book Club Play is a homecoming of sorts for Zacarias. She studied under Snodgrass and Nobel laureate and BPT founder Derek Walcott (Hon.’93) while at BU, and two of her earliest plays, The Barechested Man and The Sins of Sor Juana, were produced at BPT.

“I was super delighted to be back where I started,” Zacarias says. She describes the University’s playwriting program as life-changing and credits it with helping her hone her voice. The program reinforced to her that not everyone “has to sound the same.”

“Learning how to write an extra scene for Ibsen and Shakespeare, all of that makes you realize what your own voice is. It was about discipline. It was about opportunity. Every week we had actors come in and every week we had to bring in some type of work,” she recalls. “And we had to critique each other and lift each other up and tell each other what to do…. It became the cornerstone of my entire career.”   

Focused on producing plays by alumni of BU’s MFA playwriting program, BPT will also feature works this season by Ronan Noone (GRS’01) (The Smuggler, a play in rhyme about an Irish immigrant and the price he has to pay to become an American) and MJ Halberstadt (GRS’12) (Deal Me Out, which explores identity politics among a group of gamers in suburban Maine). 

“In selecting our seasons, I look for alumni who are writing about the big picture, who are saying something important about our lives and about our culture, but who focus also on the individual,” Snodgrass says. “In the microcosm of our everyday lives, we can locate and understand the larger choices happening all around us. I want our audiences to leave thinking and having been moved.” 

The Book Club Play by Karen Zacarias (GRS’95) runs at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., through October 13. It will be followed by The Smuggler by Ronan Noone (GRS’01) from November 7 to 24. The season’s final play, Deal Me Out by MJ Halberstadt (GRS’12), runs February 13 through March 1, 2020. Tickets are $35 for adults, $25 for BU faculty and staff and seniors 62+, and $10 for students with a valid ID. Purchase tickets online or by calling the box office at 866-811-4111.