What Theater Can Do for a City

Why documenting Boston’s theater community matters right now and how you can help.

I fell into Scene in Boston almost by accident. Or, as much by accident as you can when you launch a website and a podcast.

Three years ago this week I left my job as a senior editor at Harvard Business Review to chase a dream: a new way of connecting audiences and climate change coverage. But life happened. A month after starting that project, my oldest son was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Life, which had been really hard as my husband and I unknowingly parented a neurodiverse child in burnout without any support or tools, got more complicated. Eventually, it got easier. We got help. Therapists and funding and vocabulary that helped us research the best path forward. Today I'm happy to say our family is thriving.

Along this road I escaped to the theater. At first the nights out alone with friends felt indulgent. Soon they felt necessary. And the more I spent time in the theater, the more I found myself able to imagine worlds other than the one I felt so stuck in.

Exploring stories, exploring stages, finding new places to love and become familiar is a joy that I want to share with as many people as possible. Because the more time I spent in Boston theaters, the more I realized that this city has an extraordinary theater ecosystem, full of artists doing ambitious work.

Spending time (and money) on theater can feel like a luxury. And, as a very much "hard news" reporter, I sometimes feel self-indulgent working on Scene in Boston. But I've remembered something important, something that I knew when I launched another independent journalism project more than a decade ago and had forgotten, and that is that being able to lift yourself into a story is about being able to imagine a different future. And imagining is important. Especially now.

Stories matter because they help us imagine different possibilities. This is a story I used to tell often: I was in D.C. Superior Courthouse one afternoon, covering cases for Homicide Watch. And a detective pulled me aside to tell me about a young man he had interviewed the night before.

“He sat down with us and realized he was in on a murder case,” the detective whispered in the busy hallway. “And he said, ‘Naw man, I ain’t killed nobody. I seen Homicide Watch. They lockin’ people up for that shit now.’”

I never found out who the kid was, or if he was arrested. I don’t know if he committed a crime. I like to think perhaps he didn’t; that he’d seen the stories of those involved in homicides in DC, of both the victims and the suspects, and his reality had changed – so that he chose not to draw his knife or gun. That because he had spent time with Homicide Watch, he imagined and created a different future for himself.

And this is, I think, what theater offers us, too.

Scene in Boston's goal is simple: to help audiences discover the remarkable work happening across the region and to help artists see themselves as part of a larger creative ecosystem. Through interviews, conversations, and reporting, the project connects productions, companies, and ideas that might otherwise remain siloed. In a city with dozens of active theater companies — from major institutions to small experimental ensembles — Scene in Boston aims to act as connective tissue, helping audiences navigate the landscape while giving artists a shared platform to talk about their work.

This work is just getting started, and I’m incredibly grateful that two early grants have helped make the launch possible. I was honored to receive a Boston Opportunity Grant from the City of Boston as well as a Creative Individual Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Both grants support artists working across disciplines, and receiving them has been an encouraging vote of confidence in the idea that arts journalism itself can be a creative practice — one that strengthens the cultural communities it serves.

Now the next step is building the support needed to sustain the project. Over the coming months, I’ll be launching a fundraising drive to raise $125,000 to support the next phase of Scene in Boston. The goal is to expand reporting, support collaborations with students at Boston Arts Academy, and ensure that this work can continue documenting and connecting Boston’s theater community.

If you believe, as I do, that the arts deserve thoughtful coverage and that local creative ecosystems are worth strengthening, I hope you’ll consider being part of this effort. Here's what you can do to make sure Scene in Boston grows:

• Forward this newsletter to someone you think might enjoy it, even if you don't know if they go to shows.
• Follow us on social media. We're on instagram and facebook at SceneinBostonPod
• Help me connect with funders. I think the amount we have to raise is very do-able and even just several small gifts (tax deductible through our fiscal sponsor) will get us there.
• Get in touch. I'd love to talk one-on-one about what we're building.

Thank you for your support and encouragement as we grow into Season Two.

-Laura