Our Theater

About Us

Mission

JUVENILIA’s mission is to nurture, promote and produce adventurous work with a company of actors, directors, playwrights, stage managers and designers comprised of Suffolk University alumni.

JUVENILIA productions will advance the following values:

  • Excellence in all aspects of production and development work
  • Urgency, originality and timeliness as core aesthetic principles
  • Experimentation with form and all aspects of theatricality
  • Ensemble as aesthetic, structure and political sensibility

 

History

In 2005, Wesley Savick independently founded The National Theatre of Allston with six of his most gifted Suffolk University students. Their first production was Shouting Theatre in a Crowded Fire, based on the writings of historian/activist Howard Zinn. The following year they presented Waters Rising, an original work combining elements of Greek tragedy and musical comedy to talk about global warming. The year after that, they presented an evening of three original works in response to the final throes of the Bush administration under the title, SHUT UP! SLOW DOWN! I CAN HANDLE THIS! (How to Kill A Robot by Theo Goodell, Machine Gun-Death Rattle by Alex Pollack, and His Highness and the Dragon by Wesley Savick) as well as appearing in the Boston Theatre Marathon with their original piece, Orange Crush.

JUVENILIA is an incarnation of The National Theatre of Allston (which continues its own artistic life), and is a professional theatre in residence at the Modern Theatre at Suffolk University.

JUVENILIA unofficially began its life with a production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in the winter of 2016. Very shortly after the inauguration of President Trump in 2017, JUVENILIA partnered with The Poet’s Theatre to commission, develop and produce an entire day of original theatrical material, ONE NATION, INDETERMINABLE: A Theatrical Response to Our Nation’s Current Climate. The production included works by renowned authors Robert Brustein (The Naked Donald) and James Carroll (Midnight Ride), Suffolk alumni Theo Goodell (I Live on Land) and Nick Wilson (Polis) and the reading of a new musical, one state two state – red state, blue state by Wesley Savick, Suffolk alum Brian Bernhardt and Scott Nicholas.

JUVENILIA officially launched as JUVENILIA with their production of UBU ROAR in 2019, an original adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi commissioned from celebrated playwright/actress Brenda Withers.

In August of 2022, JUVENILIA is headed to the 75th Annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with the new original play Handbook of Civilian Defense: What Every Loyal American Can Do To Help The United States Win The War, by Professor Wesley Savick.

 

Leadership

Wesley Savick
Director

Wes has served as Artistic Director of Theatre X in Milwaukee, interim Artistic Director of the Drama League of New York’s Directors Project, Artistic Associate of Chicago’s Organic Theatre and guest director-in-residence at the DARTS Subaru Theatre in Tokyo, Japan. He received the prestigious Bunka-cho grant from the Japanese Ministry of Culture which enabled him to study traditional Japanese theatre and music in Tokyo. He has directed or acted in over one hundred professional productions, almost all new works. He has written, co-written or adapted twenty-six plays including a musical based on the NPR show “Car Talk,” adaptations of two novels by Alan Lightman, a full-length opera based on the life of Liberace and, most recently, “one state, two state/red state, blue state,” a new musical about our divided nation inspired by Arlie Hochschild’s “Strangers In Their Own Land,” which premiered at Suffolk University.

 

Jim Bernhardt
Producer

Having received his BA in theatre from Southern Illinois University and MFA in Theatre Production from Boston University, Jim has spent the last 20 years supporting and managing theatrical production in and around the Boston area. Currently General Manager of The Suffolk University Theatre Department, he has been working with Wesley Savick  in the development of Juvenilia for the better part of the last decade.