Moonbox Productions’ Boston New Works Festival (BNWF)
Presented by Moonbox Productions
June 26 – 29, 2025
Multiple Spaces at the Boston Center for the Arts.
539 Tremont St
Boston, MA 02116
Critique by Kitty Drexel
BOSTON — Last week, Moonbox Productions produced its Boston New Works Festival with seven original plays and musicals at the Boston Center of the Arts in the South End. It was the final weekend of Pride, the Supreme Court issued its final opinions before its summer recess*, the Bezos’ married in Venice, baseballers baseballed, and The Theater Offensive hosted another festival across the river in Cambridge. With the various and sundry events occurring across our city and the nation, I hope everyone attended events that brought them joy and a modicum of peace.
This year’s BNWF featured fully realized productions and semi-staged readings from local playwrights, crew and actors. I attended two productions: Mox Nox by Patrick Gabridge and Guts by Rachel Greene. These are two vastly different plays in subject and creative temperament. Mox Nox is a finished work (if such things exist). Guts remains a play in progress. Both show Boston audiences what is possible and point to our collective future as a community.
Mox Nox (or soon comes the Night)
110 minutes
Written by Patrick Gabridge
Directed by Alexandra Smith
Intimacy direction by Leanna Niesen
Magic by Evan Northrup
Featuring: Marleena Garris, Dustin Teuber, Allison Beauregard, Liv Dumaine
Mox Nox translates to “soon night” in Latin. It can be found as an epigram on sundials and refers to the moment before night falls, a.k.a. twilight.
In Gabridge’s play, Mox Nox foretells a near-future societal and environmental collapse due to global warming and irreversible climate change. The glaciers have melted; the water is rising; humanity’s survival depends on limited land resources. Mira (a sparkling Liv Dumaine) and Amanda (Allison Beauregard, stalwart and warm) reside at Mira’s family home on higher ground surrounded by water. Mira’s sister Deedee (Marleena Garris, finding joy in sorrow) and her fiancé, Pike (Dustin Teuber, as a courageous himbo), have rowed for days to find the cottage as Deedee’s memory fails. The four grapple with family dynamics and social change amidst climate change. Mox Nox has magic, resilience, and promises that nature will find a way after collapse.
This is an abstract, complex show with elements of meta- and classical theatre. Characters speak and behave in metaphors. Time is slippery, and, because human memory is generally untrustworthy, the audience doesn’t know who or what to believe until it’s too late. Mira is ill with what could be cancer or what could be an expression of the heat destroying Earth. Deedee is losing memories; she may have dementia, or maybe she’s losing her healer identity because there is nothing left of the world to heal. As the play’s events unfold, Gabridge, Smith and the cast show us what is real by slowly removing believable options. In this way, the play mimics offstage eco-politics in the real world.
Members of the cast perform sleight-of-hand magic throughout the production. Director Alexandra Smith and Magician Evan Northrup worked with the cast to incorporate their tricks as a natural extension of the performance. Pike procured flowers to make Deedee laugh. Pike and Amanda decorate the set with paper flowers for a celebration. Yes, we could see the actors prep their tricks. It was easy to see them do so once we knew what to look for, but the audience had every reason to be charmed anyway. It was well within our ability to extend our belief to sleight-of-hand magic within a climate change parable. We’re already in a black box theatre watching actors play pretend for our money. From the oohs in the audience, those of us who chose to believe in magic loved it. I know I did.
Janie E Howland’s dock and cottage scenic design with hanging vines and plastic waves for Mox Nox was ethereal. Pink and yellow flowers bloomed from railings, porch furniture, and structural columns. If one were rowing for days in a Flintstones rowboat by Kelly Smith, this little berth with sunrising and sunsetting lighting design by Narissa “nars” Kelliher would be a slice of Heaven.
The story of Mox Nox jumps around. Its stream of consciousness plot can be difficult to follow. One moment, Amanda and Mira are reminiscing with Deedee and Pike about their past lives. In the next moment, Pike faces expulsion from the refuge. Audience members must accept Mox Nox as it is and its events as they come (because sometimes reality doesn’t give us the explanation we want). If they can receive the play as it is, they’ll have a lovely time and lively discussion about what it means after.
GUTS
Written by Rachel Greene
Directed by Shalee Cole Mauleon
Intimacy Direction by Lauren Cook
Featuring: Cara Clough, Elijah Brown, Gwynneth Glickman, Hailey Madison Sebastian, Lynn Wilcott, Noah Leikind, Tiffany Santiago, Tim Lawton
Guts by Rachel Greene is still in development. It needs some rewrites to strengthen its character and plot developments. Even so, this play has some gloriously truthful moments exposing society’s bigotry and humanity’s shared insecurity that reveal a diamond in the rough.
In Guts, six contestants compete on a hit weight-loss reality T.V. show. They seek love and self-healing from their national audience and each other while suffering physical challenges that break the Geneva Conventions and screaming insults online and from their Janus-faced “trainer,” Julia (Gwynnethe Glickman). Led by their fearless leader Darla (Cara Clough) and the show’s spineless intern Jacob (Noah Leikind), the contestants Star (Elijah Brown), Tam (Hailey Madison Sebastian), Jane (Lynn Wilcott), Laurie (Tiffany Santiago), and Tommy (Tim Lawton) see if they have “the guts to lose the gut.”
Guts does the thankless job of examining weight loss culture and reality T.V. culture while also showing its audience the complicated existence of fat humans living in a world that hates them. And to be completely, excruciatingly honest, white Western Society hates fat people – whether they’re going through a phase, incubating a baby, entering puberty, entering second puberty, recovering from injury, or merely doing their best with the DNA their parents gave them, fat folx face an uphill battle.
Guts’ characters are real people, not merely best friends or class clown stereotypes. Greene gives us honest, three-dimensional depictions of humans who happen to live in larger bodies. They are lustful and sexy (thanks to intimacy director Lauren Cook), impolite and vengeful. Being in a large body and expressing confidence is a political act. If it weren’t, weight loss reality T.V. and the abuse it perpetuates wouldn’t be a billion-dollar business.
Glickman is loathsome as a Gillian Michaels’ more evil, blonde twin. She even captures the creepy stare of a woman who’s done one too many minutes on the Stairmaster.
Cara Clough was in Greene’s Jon Deserves to Die with Fresh Ink. She was last seen in Apollinaire’s The Squirrels. She was excellent in both. She’s great in Guts, but this play doesn’t challenge her like the other two plays did. It’s a strange world in which continued great work from a talented actor looks like complacency, but here we are.
The character Tommy self-describes himself in the show as a comedian who embraces his cringe. Lawton delivers a beautifully unmasked monologue about the trauma of being laughed at while suffering chronic pain. As played by Tim Lawton, Tommy isn’t merely a sad clown; he is Pagliacci, a heartbroken commedia dell’arte clown who performs for laughs despite his immense pain. It should come as no surprise that Lawton, a Boston actor known for his comedic timing, is capable of channeling such brutal honesty. Comedy and drama are two sides of the same coin. I sincerely hope the Boston theatre community remembers Lawton’s range and casts him in more roles like this one.
Guts loses the plot, as it were, when it tries to braid too many characters’ stories into one play. Greene gives us eight origin stories and attempts to make each story equally as relevant to the plot. It’s too many stories. Guts scenes become vignettes. Or, when the scenes finally find a flow, Greene gives us an ensemble scene which leads into more two- or three-character vignettes again. The audience needs to know whom we should focus on and whom we can politely ignore. When every character is important, no character is important.
Those GUTS t-shirts are so cool! Awesome design work from costumer Kat Lawrence.
That being said, Guts has the potential to be a great play. Like so much of art, it needs workshopping. Thank goodness festivals like Moonbox’s Boston New Works Festival exist to give plays like Guts and others a trial audience.
UPDATE 7/8/25: Apologies to Cara Clough. In a previous draft of this article her name was misspelled. It has been corrected.
*Please note, SCOTUS changes its rulings when the nation changes its mind about rulings. We may not see it in this decade, but we will see positive change toward the liberal minority in our lifetime. Keep voting. Keep protesting. Do not give up.
