Boston Playwrights' Theatre Premieres "Franklin," New Play by Award-Winning Playwright Samantha Noble

Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) continues its 2016-17 season with Franklin by Samantha Noble. Running from March 23 to April 2, this new drama is directed by Stephanie LeBolt.

The story of Franklin plays out in two parallel time periods: 1845, when the Franklin expedition sought the Northwest Passage in the arctic, and a contemporary story about an archaeologist searching for Franklin's lost ship.

"Franklin"'s origin comes out of an assignment in one of Noble's graduate classes with Professor Ronan Noone at Boston University. Noone challenged her to write a historical scene set at a moment that changed everything for the people involved. Noble says her mind went instantly to the last hours of the sailors of the Franklin expedition.

"It's a moment when a great ambition became a great disaster," she says. "But for the men involved, it's something worse: it's a moment of realizing that the ambition that you thought would make you great has doomed you."

Noble says that, while she started writing the play because of everything known about the expedition, it's what we don't know about that voyage that drew her into the story.

"In one sense, the loss of the Franklin expedition is a mystery that's been solved in my lifetime: We finally know the location of two lost ships that had practically become mythology in Canada," she says. "In another sense, though, it's a mystery that we'll never solve. What really happened to and between the people on those ships? We can learn a lot from the Inuit oral history surrounding the expedition, and we can discover a great deal through ongoing research. We can speculate about lead poisoning, or the long-term effects of isolation and increasing desperation. But no matter what the science turns up or what information is preserved, we'll only ever have the basic facts. We'll never actually know what happened to Franklin's men."

Last summer, "Franklin" was developed as part of the Kennedy Center and National New Play Network's M.F.A. Playwrights' Workshop. A post-show conversation with Franklin's playwright, director, and cast members will follow the March 25 performance.

Noble is a member of the Boston University M.F.A. Playwriting Program class of 2017. She attended Smith College where she was awarded the Denis Johnston Playwriting Prize. Her play A Drink was sponsored by The Nora Theatre Company in Boston Theater Marathon XVIII. Director LeBolt makes her BPT directing debut with this production. LeBolt's Boston credits include work with the Huntington Theatre Company, Fresh Ink Theatre, Lyric Stage and Bad Habit Productions.

BPT's season concludes in April with "Every Piece of Me" by Mary Conroy, co-produced with the Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Theatre as part of its New Play Initiative.

ABOUT BOSTON PLAYWRIGHTS' THEATRE

Founded in 1981 at Boston University by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Boston Playwrights' Theatre (BPT) is an award-winning professional theatre dedicated to new works. At the heart of BPT's mission is the production of new plays by alumni of its M.F.A. Playwriting Program, the latter in collaboration with Boston University's renowned School of Theatre. The program's award-winning alumni have been produced in regional and New York houses, as well as in London's West End. BPT's productions have been honored with numerous regional and Boston awards, including 12 IRNE Awards for Best New Script and six Boston Critics' Association Elliot Norton Awards.