founders & History

His plays were produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, the Negro Ensemble Company, the American Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Guthrie Theatre, among others. His stage adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey was staged to sold-out London audiences by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993. Born in 1930 on the island of Saint Lucia in the West Indies, Walcott graduated from the University College of the West Indies. In 1957, he received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study American drama and has continued to win numerous awards for his verse and drama, including an O’Neill Foundation-Wesleyan University Fellowship for Playwrights (1969), the Guggenheim Award (1977), the American Poetry Review Award (1979), the Welsh International Writer’s Prize (1980), the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (1988), and the W. H. Smith Prize (1991). Walcott was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1981.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 as the Little Carib Theatre Workshop. The Trinidad Theatre Workshop has grown into an internationally recognized repertory company based in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. They have toured the United States, and their Boston performances include the 1995 productions at the Boston University Theatre on Huntington Avenue of Walcott’s Elliot Norton Award–winning The Joker of Seville and Dream on Monkey Mountain. In 1981, when he began teaching poetry and playwriting at Boston University, with BU’s help and a portion of his MacArthur Foundation Award, Walcott established Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

Kate Snodgrass
Kate served as the Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and of the Elliot Norton Award-winning Boston Theater Marathon (which she co-founded) until 2022. She is Professor Emerita of the Practice of Playwriting at Boston University. Snodgrass is a former Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) National Chair of the Playwriting Program, a former vice president of StageSource, Inc., and a member of Actors’ Equity, A.F.T.R.A., and the Dramatists Guild.

A former playwriting fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company, Snodgrass is the author of the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman Award-winning and much-anthologized play Haiku. The play has been performed around the world and translated into German, Portuguese, and Gaelic, and the film Haiku premiered at the 1995 Boston Film Festival. Her play The Glider (BPT, 2004) was nominated for the National American Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award and won the 2005 IRNE Award for Best New Play. Snodgrass’s play Observatory (BPT, 1999) was the winner of an IRNE Award for Best New Play, the 1998 Provincetown Theatre Company’s Playwriting Award Competition, and the Best Play Award at the 2000 Southeastern Theatre Conference. Snodgrass was a member of the former Circle Repertory Theatre Lab. Her short plays L’Air Des Alpes, Que Sera, Sera, Critics’ Circle, and Wasteland have been published/anthologized by Cedar Press, Dramatic Publishing Company, Bakers Plays, and Smith and Kraus, respectively. Her one-act plays Bark’s Dream and The Last Bark with Steven Barkhimer, directed by Melia Bensussen, were commissioned and produced by Sleeping Weazel Theatre Company (2015, 2016).

As an actor, Snodgrass studied at Kansas University, Wichita State University, The London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and in NYC with disciples of Michael Chekhov and Sanford Meisner. She has appeared at Lincoln Center, in regional theatres, and on national television. Her directing credits at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre include Blackout and Prayin’ Hands by Tom McClellan, Michael Moss’s Twosome, Kimberly Brown’s Re: Pirth, Karen Zacarías’s The Barechested Man, Joyce Van Dyke’s Love in the Gulf, and Patricia Smith’s Life After Motown.

Snodgrass has taught at Wellesley College, Brandeis University, MIT, The American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, Suffolk University and Lesley University, among others. A Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, she holds two BA degrees from Kansas University and Wichita State University, respectively, and a masters degree in creative writing from Boston University. Snodgrass was the recipient of the Leonides A. Nickole Theatre Educator of the Year Award from the New England Theater Conference (2008), and the first recipient of the Milan Stitt Award for Outstanding Teacher of Playwriting from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (2010). She was StageSource’s 2001 “Theatre Hero” and the recipient of the 2012 Boston Theatre Critics’ Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence. In 2015, she was awarded a Tanne Foundation grant for her passion and commitment to the theatre. Snodgrass accepted The Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Education at Boston University in 2019.