Banner weeks don’t come much better than the one Jamie Bogyo had at the end of summer. In the space of five days, the 32-year-old New Yorker married his fiancee, actor Marisa Abela; attended the Venice film festival for the premiere of The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical about the Shaker movement in which he stars – and sings – opposite Amanda Seyfried; and began rehearsals for Safe Space, his first produced play.
As well as writing Safe Space, Bogyo appears in it as one of a group of Yale students debating whether Calhoun college, so named in honour of the 19th-century US vice-president and slavery advocate John C Calhoun, should be renamed and his statue toppled. If such a tussle already sounds quaint in 2025, along with the play’s title and its references to “snowflakes”, then that is intentional. Written by Bogyo in 2019 and based on events that occurred three years earlier, Safe Space begins its run one month after the killing of the rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk at a campus event. Wisely, there has been no attempt made to introduce hindsight into a period piece that is set near the end of Barack Obama’s second term.
