Wrap Up the Theater Season with a Bang!
Moonbox Productions
Calderwood Pavilion and Boston Center for the Arts
June 26-29, 2025
Boston is coming off a terrific 2024-2025 season that featured many excellent productions and expanding audiences. For local theater cognoscenti, there’s a great way to celebrate those successes, and look forward to new delights. Attend Moonbox’s 4th Annual New Works Festival!
Since New Works’ inception, I’ve spent the last weekend in June to hanging out around the Calderwood and BCA, where Moonbox commandeers all the performance spaces for a rotating performance schedule. This year, they will produce four staged readings and three full productions, all new works, all with a local hook.
The New Play Festival is a great opportunity for our theater community. Last year, over 100 actors, directors, and technicians got paid to lend their hand to this collaboration.
But it’s an even better deal for theater-goers.
If you’ve never been to a staged reading, it’s a memorable experience. Engaging theater relies on the audience’s imagination to embellish what’s merely implied on stage. In a reading, that faculty is amplified. When we sit among a group of actors in a semi-circle with ‘only’ scripts on music stands, our minds fill in the rest. The magic of a reading is, with a strong script and sharp actors, the compelling scenes we create in our minds.
The full productions at New Works are just that – completely staged plays with costumes, lights, sets, music, and often wonderful acting. I marvel at how polished they are for a mere four performances.
The festival is Moonbox’s generous gift to our theater community. Ticket prices are modest: $20 per reading, $25 per full performance, and there’s also a pay-what-you-can option for people of limited means. Of course, the invaluable benefit of assembling so many plays in one area at one time is the energy that flows among and between performances. Plan to spend entire day—even two—and between curtain times, chat up folks who make these shows real.
I hope to see many of you there!
The Juke from New Works 2. Photo Courtesy of Moonbox ProductionsSelected playwrights and plays for the 2025 Boston New Works Festival include:
Main Stage Plays
Luna Abréu-Santana – Fan Girl – Directed by Alexis Elisa Macedo
Roberts Studio Theatre
Friday, June 27th – 8pm
Saturday, June 28th – 3pm & 8pm
Sunday, June 29th – 3pm
Jackie Gonzalez is obsessed with Star Thieves, a hit musical TV show about the trials and tribulations of band life. While considered a “loser” at school, Jackie is lovingly embraced by her online fandom community: the “Thieves.” In an attempt to publicly humiliate Jackie, high school bully, Quinn, devises a catfishing scheme where she poses as “Willow,” a new stan on the block. As Quinn becomes emotionally invested in the fictional world of Star Thieves, Willow and Jackie’s relationship progresses and they plan to meet at the fandom event of the year: Comic Con. What will happen when Jackie realizes that her online bestie is actually the bully from her everyday life?
Rachel Greene – Guts – Directed by Shalee Cole Mauleon
Black Box Theatre
Thursday, June 26th – 7:30pm
Saturday, June 28th – 3pm & 8pm
Sunday, June 29th – 2pm
The hit reality weight-loss competition show GUTS is back with its BIGGEST! SEASON! EVER! There will be grueling challenges, verbal abuses, and – of course – the fan-favorite weekly weigh-ins. But behind the camera rivalries are forming, romances are blossoming, and friendships are being found in the most unlikely of places. Can these six contestants find self-love, communal healing, and liberation in a place designed to make them hate themselves and their bodies? Do they have the guts?
Patrick Gabridge – Mox Nox – Directed by Alexandra Smith
The Plaza Theatre
Thursday, June 26th – 7:30pm
Saturday, June 28th – 2pm & 6pm
Sunday, June 29th – 5pm
In a world of rising water, two sisters reunite at their family home. Mira, the caretaker sister, had to weather her mother’s death alone, and holds every childhood slight so close that she is literally burning from the inside out. Sister Deedee has returned to bring her fiancé, Pike, to higher ground, even as her memory vanishes. A play of lyrical magic and visual surprise, with characters who desperately need love and dry land.
READINGS
Catherine Giorgetti – Choose & Celebrate – Directed by Devon Whitney
Martin Hall
Thursday, June 26th – 8pm
Saturday, June 28th – 4pm
Sunday, June 29th – 5pm
In 1973 Boston, Teresa grapples with the realities of gay life: how to support her best friends Eric and Christopher in their union ceremony, how to deal with a homophobic straight friend who doesn’t understand her, and what to do when violence permeates her community. Inspired by stories from Gay Community News and the real queer people who lived in 1973 Boston.
Micah Pflaum – Creature Feature – Directed by Hazel J. Peters
Deane Hall
Friday, June 27th – 7pm
Saturday, June 28th – 5:30pm
Sunday, June 29th – 6pm
Creature Feature is a deconstruction of John Milton’s court masque “A Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle,” (commonly known as “Comus.”). The Shepherds of the Citadel warn their charges never to venture into the nearby woods. They tell the story of a sorcerer who dwells there, corrupting travelers into monsters. But for an acolyte hiding his own transformation, braving those woods could be his path to answers. He discovers a realm of wild magic and revelry, but when his faithful friends pursue him into apparent danger, he must confront his fear that he will bring disaster to all he loves.
James McLindon – Hitch – Directed by Donovan Holt
Martin Hall
Friday, June 27th – 8pm
Saturday, June 28th – 7:30pm
Sunday, June 29th – 2pm
Lane, a 36-year-old white man, picks up a young biracial hitchhiker in upstate New York on a summer’s morning. Dee is wary, thinking he’s hoping for a casual hook-up, but she also desperately needs a ride; he says he stopped because she looks scared, an impression that is soon borne out. As they drive on, the lies they tell each other about who they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, slowly begin to unravel as they learn from each other about missing fathers and missing daughters and families. In the end, both realize they need to face their demons … and decide whether to turn back or keep going.
Mireya Sánchez-Maes – How to Kill a Goat – Directed by Daniela Luz Sánchez
Deane Hall
Saturday, June 28th – 2pm & 8pm
Sunday, June 29th – 3pm
“The best way to get to know New Mexico is through its music!” In How to Kill a Goat, Mariana takes the audience on a wild ride through her life as a bilingual Chicana in the borderlands. Packed with humor, music, and vivid characters, Mariana shares stories of slaughtering goats, fitting bras, falling in love, and facing loss. With each vignette, the play asks: Why do we tell stories? And how do we keep our culture alive?
