Editor’s Pick: Keegan’s Boiler Room Series
Keegan Theatre's Boiler Room series offers support and a stage for new and unique performances and performers.
Keegan’s 2023 Boiler Room Series spawned the recent hit Push The Button, which was workshopped and presented as part of the 2022 iteration.
Launched in 2017, the Boiler Room Series is officially described as “offering support and a stage for new and unique performances and performers, and working to promote the creative minds that are driving theater in D.C. and beyond to new and unexpected places.”
Last year’s series is actually the source of two world-premiere productions in Keegan’s current 2022-2023 Mainstage season. Immediately following Push The Button, the theater’s flood lights will shine on Graziella Jackson’s The Wilting Point, described as “a new play about climate and culture, and about conflict and connectedness.”
During its mid-to-late April run, The Wilting Point will be complemented by readings of three other works in development from Jackson, Keegan’s 2022-2023 Playwright-in-Residence.
A four-part play cycle, “The Elements Plays” explore aspects of the climate crisis, its impact on local communities, and coverage by the news media.
The 2023 Boiler Room series kicks off with free readings and post-reading moderated talkbacks, starting at 7 p.m. on Mondays, featuring Jackson’s Air, directed by Momo Nakamura (4/10), Earth directed by BRS Artistic Director Josh Sticklin (4/17), and Fire directed by Paige Washington (4/24) — all presented at Keegan’s Church Street theater.
Selected from hundreds of new-play submissions received in 2022, three additional works in development factor into the 2023 Boiler Room series, with half-day workshops culminating in live, open-to-the-public table readings followed by talkbacks on select Mondays in May.
Presented at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum 1901 (Fort Place SE), the lineup includes:
- Kate Black-Spence’s Enter Gretta, about a novelist whose worlds of fiction and reality both turn upside down and become perplexing intertwined. (5/1)
- Alyssa Haddad-Chin’s You Should Be So Lucky, offering a glimpse of the generational and cultural changes between a Chinese-American grandmother and granddaughter set in contemporary Chinatown. (5/8)
- Stephen Mills’s Waiting for Manilow, a slice-of-life look at a 17-year-old gay boy, his best gal pal, an unexpected run-in from another classmate (5/14).
- Angelle Whavers’s The Oreos, a modern theatrical spin on the 1970 film Watermelon Man as a young white couple wakes up Black and is forced to learn what it’s like to be Black in today’s America. (5/15)
All readings are offered for free but Pay-What-You-Can is encouraged and online reservations are recommended. Visit www.keegantheatre.com or call 202-265-3767.
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