For all the complexity of Rachel Bublitz’s Burst, much of its dramatic action is propelled by one strikingly singular force: central character Sarah Boyd’s all-consuming ambition. In seeking to solve the global plastic waste problem, Boyd is tackling something she describes as “the largest dilemma ever brought before mankind”—and she would have us believe that she’s astonishingly close to saving the world with her solution.
Without giving too much away, it eventually becomes clear that Boyd’s purported “solutions” may not be all they’re cracked up to be. And though Bublitz’s own ambitions for Burst were admittedly a little smaller scale than human salvation, this playwright ultimately outshines her protagonist in one crucial respect. Where Boyd’s claims eventually collapse into smoke and mirrors, the lofty goal that propelled Bublitz to create the character is something the play actually delivers on.
“I wanted to write an antihero as big as a Shakespeare antihero, as big as Richard III,” Bublitz says.
At the time, Bublitz was living in the Bay Area, which gave this idea a chance to collide with all the “crazy tech stories” that were coming out of the woodwork.
At the time, Bublitz was living in the Bay Area, which gave this idea a chance to collide with all the “crazy tech stories” that were coming out of the woodwork. “My husbands in tech, and I hear firsthand about what wild things were expected. The late hours, the fudging of the truth… A lot of tech ideas don’t make money and so they fudge a lot,” she notes, referencing the contrasting examples of WeWork, which crashed into bankruptcy from a $47 billion valuation, and Uber, which eventually evolved into a profitable company and modern mainstay after running for nine years at a loss.
Though Bublitz was hesitant to make too direct a connection between Burst’s plot and the downfall of blood-testing start-up Theranos, especially given the company’s notoriously litigious nature, she does seem to have taken some inspiration from the story as a turning point where the deceptions of start-up culture crossed the line into something criminal.
“I think the difference is that she went into something that affected people,” Bublitz says, referencing the impact of Theranos’s decision to proceed with the roll-out of its tests despite evidence that the results were highly unreliable.
In Burst, the technology Sarah Boyd is peddling as CEO of fictional start-up Tactix is a new biodegradable plastic—and while the consequences of “fudging the truth” here may not be as immediate as those of a critical misdiagnosis, they could be as destructive for the environment as Theranos’s deceptions were for individual patients.
Though the play makes this risk clear, there’s enough moral ambiguity to Boyd’s motivations to keep her from becoming a cardboard villain. Rather than acting purely out of self-interest, she seems to genuinely see herself as the sole champion of a cause others have failed to take seriously. Perhaps even more critically, she also displays a misguided certainty that getting Tactix’s actual tech to measure up to her high ideals is only a matter of time.
“I think she feels like every end justifies this means, and I also think she gets distracted by how to make this a business,” Bublitz describes, also noting that Boyd feels betrayed by her collaborators’ failure to deliver scientific advances at the speed that she’s been able to grow the company.
Still, Bublitz seemed a little surprised when she talked about how some audience members responded to the show, particularly a group of poets who were invited to write original poetry inspired by the play after attending a preview.
“So many of them were in her favor,” she says, offering evidence that her efforts to create an engaging antiheroine might’ve been even more successful than she intended.
Indeed, some seemed to find something empowering in Sarah’s willingness to sacrifice literal truth in the service of her transformative vision, especially as a woman trying to carve out a place for herself in a male-dominated industry by any means necessary.
“What’s interesting about Sarah and her stance on women is that in order to have a board that is mostly women in the tech industry… you have to do that intentionally. And the fact that she’s doing that but denying it… I find that really fascinating,” Bublitz says, referencing Sarah’s efforts to cultivate a female-dominated workforce at Tactix as she weighs in on the character’s complicated brand of conditional feminism.
Yes, she’s gone out of her way to create opportunities for other women, but there’s evidence she’s doing it less because she cares about their advancement than because she knows that presenting Tactix as female-led is something she can leverage into media attention and funding opportunities.
Boyd is eager to emphasize gender when it serves her PR purposes, but her frustration with being pigeonholed for it has curdled into a dismissive attitude towards other women, who she also proves plenty willing to throw under the bus in order to protect her company’s image.
For instance, when Boyd learns that female reporter Alexis Lyons has been sent to interview her rather than the male journalist she expected, she immediately assumes Lyons is an unqualified intern and only after a puff piece.
Later, she tries to throw Lyons off the scent of any skeletons in the closet by accusing her of almost the same bias, quipping:
SARAH: I started Tactix with Jennifer Weaver because she has a profound and keen understanding of both organic and inorganic chemistry. I did not pick her because we both have vaginas.
Given Boyd’s resentment of finding her achievements minimized to those of a “female CEO” of a “women’s company,” a thought Bublitz shares about realizing that Burst was inevitably going to be seen as a “women’s play” thanks to its all-female cast strikes a particular chord.
Though Bublitz describes the gender politics of Burst as one of the ways she found her “place” in the piece as a story she felt passionate about telling, these themes remain peripheral enough to the play’s more pressing environmental and cultural concerns to make reducing the show to that dimension feel like a big mistake.
However, the cast’s makeup does reflect another of Bublitz’s longstanding ambitions—to create the kinds of juicy parts often reserved for male characters in the classical canon that she once wished she could play.
This desire grew out of her roots in theatre as an actress and director, and emerged following a pivot to playwriting on Bublitz’s part that started as one of necessity after she became a mother. While the practical and financial demands of child-rearing made being in plays far less feasible for her, Bublitz realized that she could write scripts from anywhere—and once she started trying her hand at that, she quickly started to fall in love with the challenge.
“I never looked back,” she describes.
In the years since, Bublitz has amassed an impressive resume of productions and publications of her work, and has even written a book about how she did it entitled How to Build a Playwright. In an event of the same name that followed the first weekend of Burst, she shared some useful technical advice from the book as well as some insightful reflection on how she actually built her own career.
BURST. From left: Dayana Morales as Alexis Lyons, Nicole Hulett as Sarah
Boyd, and Mary Gundlach as Jennifer Weaver. Photo by Kevin Ondarza.
