Bo Wilson

Bo Wilson

Bo Wilson was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and lived all over the southeast before settling in Richmond, Virginia just in time to start fourth grade. Richmond has been his home ever since, with time away at Virginia Tech and at the National Theatre Institute. He makes his living primarily as a writer, creating stage plays and scripts for training films.

Among his 30+ plays are "...
Bo Wilson was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and lived all over the southeast before settling in Richmond, Virginia just in time to start fourth grade. Richmond has been his home ever since, with time away at Virginia Tech and at the National Theatre Institute. He makes his living primarily as a writer, creating stage plays and scripts for training films.

Among his 30+ plays are "The Charitable Sisterhood of the Second Trinity Victory Church" (a smash hit at Va-Rep’s Hanover Tavern) and "The Boatwright", which won two national awards and premiered at the Grand Rapids Civic Theater of Michigan in 2014 and will receive its professional premiere at The Firehouse Theater in February, 2017. He has written thirty or so other titles, and has been published by Dramatic Publishing, Samuel French, and Algonquin Press. In 2016, his play, "The Bookbinder’s Tale", was a finalist for the National Playwrights’ Conference at the O’Neill Theatre Center.

His film clients include the FBI, Dupont, the US Navy, the Defense Intelligence Analysts, and numerous others, covering topics ranging from workplace safety to cyber warfare to terrorist interdiction.

Bo is also a professional voice talent with several hundred radio and TV ads to his credit, for products ranging from Sylvan Learning Centers to Mohatma Rice to the Fallout video game series.

Bo’s better half is the lovely Jan Guarino, who, along with his children Nora and Zach, add romantic comedy, drama, and surrealism to his life.


Plays

  • The Boatwright by Bo Wilson
    Recommendations: 1
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    Cast: 
    2
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    Genre: drama
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    Keyword: Mental Health, fathers and sons + 5 more
    Genre: drama
    Keyword: Mental Health, fathers and sons, language-driven, intimacy, substance abuse, coming of age, naturalism
    Ben Calloway can't seem to get his bearings in his own home anymore. Fifty-seven years old, recently widowed, childless and retired from the Kansas Highway Patrol, he's adrift-and even though he's never seen the ocean, he decides he should build a boat and sail across the Atlantic, single-handedly. Ben doesn't particularly want any part of his neighbor Jaime Watson's problems. Jaime...
    Ben Calloway can't seem to get his bearings in his own home anymore. Fifty-seven years old, recently widowed, childless and retired from the Kansas Highway Patrol, he's adrift-and even though he's never seen the ocean, he decides he should build a boat and sail across the Atlantic, single-handedly. Ben doesn't particularly want any part of his neighbor Jaime Watson's problems. Jaime has been suspended from film school, and Jaime's father has lost patience with the troubled young man. But when Ben decides to let Jaime make a movie about his boat-building project, the two men-generations apart and lonely in very different ways-force each other to confront the isolation in their own lives. Whether Ben is crazy or courageous, whether Jaime is ill or merely lost, whether either can help the other find his way to peace, in seeking answers, Jaime and Ben also seek truths about themselves, each navigating as best he can by the light of the other's faith. Unit set. Approximate running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.
  • In Service of the Queen by Bo Wilson
    Cast: 
    7–20
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    Genre: adventure, fable/folktale + 1 more
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    Keyword: magical realism, Victorian
    Genre: adventure, fable/folktale, fantasy
    Keyword: magical realism, Victorian
    "In Service of the Queen" is a seagoing adventure for the stage, compassing loyalty, love, loneliness, and the many faces of colonialism. At the center of its journey across the globe is one brave woman's quest to find home.

    Annie Pilgrim is a middle-aged nineteenth-century Englishwoman who seizes a unique opportunity to escape the confines of her solitary rural spinsterhood: The...
    "In Service of the Queen" is a seagoing adventure for the stage, compassing loyalty, love, loneliness, and the many faces of colonialism. At the center of its journey across the globe is one brave woman's quest to find home.

    Annie Pilgrim is a middle-aged nineteenth-century Englishwoman who seizes a unique opportunity to escape the confines of her solitary rural spinsterhood: The crown will pay a handsome reward to anyone who succeeds in introducing domestic honeybees to the largely uncharted colony of New Zealand.

    With her entire life stuffed into a few small crates, Annie takes to the sea; but she is at the mercy of forces stranger and more mysterious than the unpredictable ocean currents. Before she can make sense of the changes sweeping over her, her arrival on foreign soil places her and her bees at the center of a fiercely-waged dispute between the colonists and the native Maori, and her new home threatens to collapse around her before she's even unpacked. But Annie Pilgrim is not so easily bested -- neither by the New World nor by the Old.
  • The Bookbinder's Tale by Bo Wilson
    Recommendations: 2
    ·
    Cast: 
    3
    ·
    Genre: fable/folktale, romantic comedy
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    Keyword: magic, Surreal
    Genre: fable/folktale, romantic comedy
    Keyword: magic, Surreal
    Once upon a time, at a Prominent University, a young woman named Mina wanted to help people see their lives as stories they tell.
    Once upon a time, at the same Prominent University, Mina’s fiancé, the chair of the English department, wanted to indulge her.
    Once upon a time, at (yes,) a cheerfully charming Italian bookbinder thought Mina’s story and his own might become a single, well-spun saga...
    Once upon a time, at a Prominent University, a young woman named Mina wanted to help people see their lives as stories they tell.
    Once upon a time, at the same Prominent University, Mina’s fiancé, the chair of the English department, wanted to indulge her.
    Once upon a time, at (yes,) a cheerfully charming Italian bookbinder thought Mina’s story and his own might become a single, well-spun saga.
    "The Bookbinder’s Tale" is a love triangle that travels in and out of its three characters' fables, seen through one another's eyes. By turns funny, breathtaking and touching, it invites us to return to Story--our oldest and best home.

Recommended by Bo Wilson

  • Magellanica by E. M. Lewis
    28 Apr. 2016
    “ Wry wit, compelling characters, suspenseful circumstances, and complicated questions with the courage to resist pat answers, all offered in style that is the purest and most human kind of theatre. This is wonderful work. ”