In adding up my stats for this year, I realized that I reached a fun milestone with my writing. 2025 saw the 500th performance of my history plays in Greater Boston. My first was a production of Fire on Earth by Fresh Ink, produced at the (now defunct) Piano Factory in Boston’s South End in 2013. It was a play I’d worked on for years and years, and I finally did a huge overhaul thanks to input from the literary staff at the Huntington Theatre Company and a workshop there.  That led to a kick ass show, with an awesome director and cast, that sadly lost a whole week of shows to a blizzard.

Since then I’ve written a lot more history plays, and  I founded Plays in Place, which has commissioned and produced a lot of my plays at museums and historic sites.  In my career, I’ve written about 24 historical plays, of various lengths. I LOVE researching and writing them, and I love the challenge that comes with the puzzle of each one.

I’ve been working in the Boston theatre scene since we moved to Roxbury from the Midwest, in 2000. I now live in Western MA, but Boston is still very much a part of my theatrical roots and home and has been for 25 years.

Keeping track of such stats might seem like an odd thing, or a bit self-indulgent, and perhaps it is. But playwrights need to find whatever tricks they can to keep going in a world where productions are scarce. Most of my work has been produced in museum settings, for small houses, and it’s nearly impossible to attract critics and attention from the artistic community. Many of these plays are super site-specific, so aren’t portable. In my 25 years working in Boston, I have never had a full-length play fully produced by a medium or large professional theatre company in the area.  But I know my work is getting seen by audiences (I haven’t calculated fully, but I’d estimate 20,000+ people saw these shows) and it’s made a difference for how people perceive history, as well as the world we live in now. And I’ve gotten to work with hundreds of talented theatre artists in the community that I called home for decades.

It’s been a lot of work, but I feel very, very lucky.  I look forward to the next hundred performances (and beyond).

For the record, here’s a list of the shows and numbers of performances:

1. Fire on Earth, 2013: 10 performances (Fresh Ink Theatre at the Piano Factory in Boston)
2. None But the Best, 2013, 2018, 2019: ~10 performances  (In Good Company, various locations)

3. Blood on the Snow, 2016: 20 performances (Old State House)
4. Blood on the Snow, 2017: 60 (Old State House)
5. Cato & Dolly, 2018 and 2019: ~270 (Old State House, Plays in Place)
6. The Nature Plays, 2019: 12 (Mount Auburn Cemetery, Plays in Place)
7. The America Plays, 2019: 12 (Mount Auburn Cemetery, Plays in Place)
8. Moonlight Abolitionists, 2021 and 2022: 11 (Mount Auburn Cemetery, Plays in Place)
9. The Great Disappointment, 2023: 1 (Boston Theater Marathon, Boston Playwrights Theatre & Northeastern University.
10. Revolution’s Edge, 2023: 42 (Old North Church, Plays in Place)
11. Revolution’s Edge, 2024: 37 (Old North Church, Plays in Place)
12. A Light Under the Dome, 2024: 8 (National Parks of Boston, MA State House, Plays in Place)
13. Revolution’s Edge, 2025, 1 (Prado behind Old North, Plays in Place)
14. A Revelation of Character, 2025, 3 (Rabb Hall, BPL, Plays in Place)
15. The Kittie Knox Plays (Welcome to Asbury Park), 2025, 9 (Cambridge, Boston, Milton, Plays in Place)

506 total performances of my historical plays in Greater Boston, since 2013.  More to come.

(Another odd way to look at this milestone is that over 12 years a history play of mine was performed on almost 12% of the days in that period in Greater Boston.)