The richness and diversity in the theatre community in the Boston area can be seen in the past as much as in the present. While there may be enormous attraction to the city because of its history, it’s the creativity in the present that brings visitors. Any time of the year, travelers to the area can enjoy the gifts of the city with a stay in a Boston hotel , and the promise of seeing some delightful new work for the stage.

Boston Playwrights Theatre began in 1981, and has become something of a fixture in the local and international theatre scene. The focus is on student work, where the MFA students enrolled in the English Department at Boston University have the opportunity to see their words come to life off the page. The purpose of the theatre, however, is to produce work from multiple arenas, with performances of plays by authors as distinguished as the late Howard Zinn, and there are also productions from other companies using the space as their temporary venue.

A temporary home is all that a theatre can ever offer a playwright, whose work and life are always itinerant, and always wandering. It’s the wandering, however, that offers the most hope for the journey. The theater’s founder, Derek Walcott , has been wandering for a lifetime, tracking the reach and direction of his dreams on the page for the stage, as well as in poetry and visual art.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1992, one of his most famous works is en epic poem, Omeros, which is a re-telling of Homer through his Caribbean lens. Wandering and homelessness are the major themes of the poem, as it is in Homer, and it is through the wandering that new identities get forged, ones that can point new directions for humanity in new times and in new geographies. It is the strength and openness of his vision that has made a home for so many playwrights here, who track their own histories to create stories told in time, reflecting a Boston that is connected to multiple pasts and presents.

When I was twelve years old, I saw my first musical.  It was a production of “Annie” at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix.  At that time, the downtown area did not have many venues, it was the Orhpeum and the Symphony Hall.  I had been to the Symphony Hall many times, to see the Phoenix Symphony and then to perform a few times a year with the dance company I grew up in.  But I had never seen a building such as The Opheum, with the gilded gold columns, the winding staircases and the heavy red velvet curtains.  It was one of the first, best nights of my life.  Later on, when I was seventeen, I saw REM play there.  It was an intimate space as the band had not yet become the mega-stars they are today.  Again, another very fine night.

The construction of the theatre began in 1927, and when in 1929 the theatre opened its doors and the history of downtown had begun.  Throughout World War II and the Depression, the theatre presented live shows and “talkie” movies, and provided relief for the people suffering through those times.  Following 1949, many people began moving out to the suburbs, a situation still occurring today which has made it difficult to build up the downtown entertainment districts to this day.

During the mid-eighties there were considerations to tear down the building and put up a new and modern commercial building.  But the residents of the city, and the mayor at that time, Terry Goddard, succeeded in adding the building to the National Register of Historic Places, and the Orpheum was saved.  Downtown has now become a place for entertainment from the Bank One Ball Park and other corporate sponsored large venues, sitting up right next to some of the best Phoenix Hotels.  There is modern architecture now, but the charm of the city and the history has been preserved with the renovation of the Orpheum, and when you walk around downtown now, you will see projects under way that are restoring many of the other beautiful and older buildings of the city.  It is become quite an eclectic and interesting downtown hub.

Matty and Sally were still in college when they decided to take their first trip to New York together. They had talked about it for a year and finally felt they had scraped enough money together for a weeklong stay. Sally was absolutely in love with Jude Law and insisted they see a production of Hamlet while they were there. Matty was interested in doing that, though he was also a bit more practical and wanted to plan out their major expenses in advance since they were on a limited budget. Sally would have been happy just arriving in the city and having a great time until the money was gone. But since Matty wanted to plan, she insisted that they include a performance of Hamlet as one of their priorities and even insisted they buy advance tickets.

They Matt a list of all the potential activities they wanted to do, at Matty’s enforced decision, and then he put an expected price next to each one. They went down the list and put a check mark by each of the events or places they wanted to go to the most and did this until they had run out of money. Matty really wanted to take a ferry ride out to Ellis Island and tour the statue of Liberty. He also wanted to go to the Empire State Building and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These were the last things Sally wanted to do and resisted putting them on the list.

Finally Matty came up with an idea of how to do all of the activities on their list while also being able to eat every day. Sally actually had suggested that they skip eating one day to leave money for the production of Hamlet. Matty readjusted the amount of money they would spend on the resort and found a beautiful little New York cheap hotel they could stay in that would save them quite a bit of money. Sally thought that Matty was a genius and her slowly developing crush on him took a major evolutionary advancement. However, it still didn’t equal the one she had on Jude Law.

New York has long been known as the theater capital of the United States, and perhaps even of the world.  So much history and imagination and lure surround the theatres of New York, and anyone wishing to enter the world of the performing arts, has their sights set on this city.  One of those theaters is the Belasco which is on 44th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue.  In the early 1900′s  the poorer working class people were only able to be seated in the balconies of the larger venues.  Finding frustration in this they generally stopped going to see live performances and started heading to the movie theaters.

It was during this time that theaters began to change.  The larger performance halls were being joined by newer, and smaller venues.  One man interested in this smaller and more intimate venue for producing live plays was David Belasco.  The smaller theaters allowed a different kind of drama, a more intimate and up close look of the work, thus creating a different feel for the work and the performers.  The theater opened in 1907, close to many of the boutique hotels in New York City, and was colonial in architectural design on the exterior, and Neo-Georgian style on the interior and in the auditorium.  Everett Shinn, a well known artist at the time and still famous today, painted eighteen murals on the inside of the theater.

Belasco himself oversaw the construction and made sure that all of the technology was the most current and the most innovative, including the lighting, a studio for special effects and an elevated stage.  For a short time during the 1950′s the Belasco Theater operated as the NBC radio station, but aside from that time it has been operating and putting on live Broadway shows for more that one hundred years.  Many famous plays and players have graced this stage in that time, and it is known as the home stage for the 1975 live production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show staring Tim Curry.  This is one of the historical venues of the city, and one should most definitely see a show here when in the city of New York.