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.
“It has to feel current but I don’t need it to feel zeitgeisty,” says the tall, toothy, floppy-haired Bogyo over coffee before rehearsals. “It has to deal with things that are bigger than just what you’ve seen on the news recently. The political climate of the world hasn’t moved forward that much from 2016. We’re just looking through a different lens now. Like: how did we get from there to here?”
The emphasis, though, is on characters rather than issues. “These kids are trying to find their identity in the age of identity politics.” They include Annabelle (Céline Buckens), a well-meaning white liberal perturbed by what she suspects is institutional favouritism toward her Black friend Stacey (Bola Akeju), and Isaiah (Ernest Kingsley Jr), a soloist in the college’s a cappella group who is pressured to lend his name to the anti-Calhoun cause.
Bogyo says Safe Space is about how we love people with whom we disagree. What experience does he have of that? “When I was younger, I prided myself on not getting worked up by disagreements. But I’ve realised that came with a certain level of privilege. Rarely as a straight white man did I feel personally attacked, so I could compartmentalise an ideology that I knew was problematic. You know, ‘Oh, they’re probably just saying this because of their upbringing.’ I would look for that human level of connection. Those excuses can make you feel flimsy on the inside. That’s something that some of these characters also struggle with.”
The statue exists in the play to give the past a concrete physical presence on stage. “There never was a Calhoun statue,” Bogyo tells me, “but the arguments against the name were real.” He was a senior at Yale in 2016 when it all kicked off. What was his contribution? “I made some impassioned … Facebook posts. I said stuff that I thought sounded meaningful but was also a bit cringe. There was the worry that if I didn’t post something, I’d be judged for my silence.” He hasn’t stinted on cringe in the play, whether it’s Annabelle’s performative idolatry of Obama, or Isaiah being caught masturbating. The latter scene will cause one former Yale student no end of blushes. “It really happened,” Bogyo says.
Bogyo has hitherto been associated with musical theatre, including the West End run of Moulin Rouge!, for which the Observer critic Susannah Clapp called him “the discovery of the evening”. Hardly surprising from a Broadway baby whose mother was an opera singer and whose father was an assistant to Stephen Sondheim. Bogyo Sr also taught Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver to “ribbet” for the original Yale production of Sondheim’s The Frogs.
Future writing projects, though, will see Bogyo continuing to dramatise the world of education. For some years now he has run a private tuition company, American Education Experts, and once tutored the children of the super-rich. One family took him to Ibiza on their luxury yacht. Another client was a Bin Laden. Bogyo looks slightly abashed when I bring this up. “They’re a huge family,” he explains. “And he’s a sweet kid.”
He has vague plans to write an action caper based on his tutoring experiences, but is currently working on a comedy-drama about SATs, in which he hopes Abela will play a teacher. “The pressures bring out so many interesting qualities in parents and students alike,” he says. Then he heads off to rehearsals where a mock-up of his old Yale dorm room awaits. Every day’s a school day.
Safe Space is at Minerva theatre, Chichester, from 11 October to 8 November
