Gloucester playwrights arrive in Boston

The Boston Playwrights' Theater on Commonwealth Avenue has approximately 80 seats. Perfect, said both John Ronan and M. Lynda Robinson, local playwrights whose respective plays "The Yeats Game" and "Wives" are slated to run at the theater in the next couple of weeks.

"It's a very intimate space," said Robinson.

"There is a bit of voyeurism in John's play so it's nice to be able to be up close and personal with it," she quipped.

'The Yeats Game'

For Ronan, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Bread Loaf Scholar, poet, screenwriter, documentarian, journalist and professor, "The Yeats Game" is his first play. For Robinson, "Wives" is another step in a career of theater and acting.

Ronan's "The Yeats Game" will run at the Playwrights' Theater March 26-30 (Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at. 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.)

Ronan got the title of "The Yeats Game" from one of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats' famous lines: "I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead."

"The lesson of the struggles with age is to keep the early drives going, but in a more mature way, in a seasoned way," said Ronan.

They play is the result of a four-year process.