Scripting Her Path

Award-winning playwright Alexis Scheer (BFA '14, musical theater) made her mark in 2019 as a fresh theatrical voice with her New York Times Critic’s Pick horror play Our Dear Dead Drug Lord. She has since drawn acclaim for plays that take on a vast range of subject matter and tone, from tragic explorations of war and PTSD in the off-Broadway play Breaking the Story to the comedic crime caper Laughs in Spanish. Also a writer for TV, film, and musicals, Scheer made her Broadway debut in 2023, adapting the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella, and wrote the stage adaptation of Jerry Herman’s Mrs. Santa Claus, which will premiere this year at Goodspeed Musicals. Here, Scheer discusses her path from musical theater performance to writing, and the connections she made as a Boston Conservatory student that carried over into her career—including meeting her now-husband Dan Ryan (MM '15, choral conducting) on the BoCo Facebook Craigslist.

Talk about your process for developing ideas for your plays. How do you know when an idea is worth following?

My approach is very visual, so usually the idea I’m starting out with is simply something I’d like to see onstage, like girls around a Ouija board or a woman in a press vest and helmet. This image could be inspired by a book I’m reading, an evocative photo or piece of art, or a childhood memory. And I know the idea is worth pursuing if I can’t shake the image out of my head. But then the process for each play is different—sometimes I dive into writing, while other times I spend years turning the idea over in my head and doing research. And while my work is varied in tone, content, and form, I’ve also come to realize that I really just keep posing different ways to ask the same question: What does a woman’s ambition cost her? 

How did you arrive on the writing path? 

I’ve been writing plays since I was a kid, and it was actually part of my high school curriculum (I went to the amazing New World School of the Arts in Miami). When I got to BoCo, there were no formal opportunities to explore playwriting, so I created them myself—with the theater company I started, Off the Grid, and also with an independent study. After graduation, I stayed in Boston to act, direct, and produce, and eventually I became hungry for more formal writing training. So I followed my curiosity to Boston University’s MFA playwriting program, and that’s where I felt a profound alignment between my craft and my purpose. And the rest is history!

“I really just keep posing different ways to ask the same question: What does a woman’s ambition cost her?”
—Alexis Scheer

Has your background in musical theater performance helped your career as a writer?

Yes! My acting experience has always informed the way I write. And now that I’m actually writing musicals, it’s all come full circle. Having that foundation in the practical application of the form has been the greatest advantage. What’s also been fun are the unexpected moments when my musical theater BFA comes in handy—like when I was writing on the television show Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin and got to help shape one of the characters who was a ballerina because I was the person in the writers’ room who had years of ballet training to pull from.

The people you connect with artistically or personally as a student often tend to be your future collaborators. Could you talk about some of these relationships?

Where do I even start? There’s Christian Denzel Bufford (BFA '14), my sophomore-year roommate, who I sent the first draft of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord to in 2017 when he was a company member at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which led to both my and the play’s first professional workshop. Then, in 2019, Our Dear Dead Drug Lord was premiering off Broadway, produced in part by Ben Simpson (BFA '11) and Joe Longthorne (BFA '12), who I had kept in touch with after knowing them as students. And then there are my former professors who I’ve gotten to work with in a professional capacity all these years later, like Paul Daigneault, who programmed Laughs in Spanish at SpeakEasy Stage as part of his final season as artistic director, and Liz Hayes, who was recently the voice and dialects coach for Breaking the Story off Broadway. Liz brought out the playbill of Romeo and Juliet that I directed as a student, and I cried—I couldn’t believe she held onto it for a decade! And then, obviously, there’s Dan Ryan, my favorite BoCo connection, who I ended up marrying. 

How did you and Dan meet? 

We met via the BoCo Facebook Craigslist when I graduated in 2014—I posted in search of a guitar I could borrow, and he lent me his. We reconnected four years after that and then got married in 2022. And I got to keep the guitar! 

Dan was also the composer on Breaking the Story. How does working with your spouse compare with other collaborations?

All the qualities that make us great life partners—love, trust, respect, communication, and joy—are what make us great artistic partners. And working with him is different from working with other collaborators because of the shorthand we share. We have a finely tuned sense of each other’s aesthetic, taste, and expertise, and so many of the experiences I draw on for inspiration are shared with him, which helps us get very clear and specific in the work.

Learn more about Alexis Scheer and her latest projects. 

READ: STAGES 2025

“Scripting Her Path” first appeared in the 2025 issue of STAGES, Boston Conservatory’s annual magazine.