Columbia Playwrights Head to 2025 Valdez Theatre Conference

Writing alum Brysen Boyd ’20 and Theatre alum Fernando Buzhar Segall ’24 will have work featured in the 2025 Valdez Theatre Conference in Anchorage, Alaska. Their selected plays will be read and responded to by a panel of theatre professionals in the Play Lab.

The center of the festival, the Play Lab, has featured developmental readings of scripts since 1995. Surrounding the Play Lab are a series of interactive classes and panel discussions on both the craft and business of theatre. The conference also features several performances of plays written by alumni. While many of the returning artists are Alaskan, participants have hailed from as far as Australia. This year's conference runs from June 7–14, 2025.

The World’s Most Boring Murder, by Buzhar Segall, will be read on Monday, June 9. The play is a farce of a murder mystery inspired by Brazilian clown traditions and follows a green police inspector and his equally inexperienced assistants as they try to solve their small town’s very first crime—a brutal murder—before anyone else gets hurt.

Boyd’s play, A naked man in his early 80s stands in the center of the stage, is slated to be read on June 12. The play explores what a life amounts to in the form of a Greek chorus.

Fernando Buzhar Segall is a Brazilian writer based in New York City. He currently has two features in development, including Wrong Place, Wrong Time, which has renowned Brazilian director and showrunner Pedro Morelli attached to direct. He has developed TV projects for HBO Latin America and is the translator of Lynn Nottage’s and Itamar Moses’ works to Portuguese. He spent his formative years working as an actor and a clown.

Bryson Boyd is a playwright, TV writer and essayist from Tacoma, Washington. He has served on the writing staff of Succession (HBO) and has essays appearing or forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, Orca: A Literary Journal, and elsewhere. His awarded plays include Family Sideshow and 6101 Nyanza. His work has been recognized or received support from Tin House, Page 73, The Kennedy Center and Sewanee Writers Conference. He is the inaugural Playwright-in-Residence at Reverie Theater Company and he loves his miniature dachshunds.