Bubba Weiler and Jack Serio trust in young talent with 'The Saviors'

Teen performers are at the center of the writer and director's latest Off-Broadway collaboration, in which two boys' search for meaning is shaped by their Catholic upbringings.

Summary

• Playwright Bubba Weiler and director Jack Serio discuss their latest collaboration on The Saviors off Broadway
• The pair previously mounted the acclaimed drama Well I’ll Let You Go in 2025
• The Saviors features teen leads played by actual teen actors to show that young talent can carry a play's emotional weight
• The plot follows two altar boys navigating their changing beliefs after the arrival of a stranger at their church

When the house lights rise on the world premiere of The Saviors, a new drama at Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater from July 8 to August 8, audiences will bear witness to a rare and striking creative vision. Playwright Bubba Weiler and director Jack Serio, in their second Off-Broadway collaboration in a year, place the emotional heavy lifting firmly on the shoulders of two adolescent boys.

Set in a modest Midwestern Catholic church, The Saviors follows two devoted young altar boys whose lives are upended when a mysterious, desperate young man seeks shelter in their sanctuary. As the boys attempt to manage this unexpected intrusion, they find themselves clinging to each other while their shifting belief systems and loss of innocence threaten to tear their relationship apart.

The creative partnership responsible for bringing this story to life is built on years of mutual respect and shared history. Weiler and Serio originally met at New York University, where Weiler served as the teaching assistant for Serio’s playwriting class. Most recently, the pair mounted the celebrated play Well, I’ll Let You Go in 2025, which earned significant awards recognition and received a 2026 encore run that wrapped earlier this month. That successful collaboration forged a deep, enduring artistic bond between the playwright and director.

“Through working on Well, I’ll Let You Go, Jack and I have developed a shorthand and a shared brain, taste-wise, in terms of emotionality, and rawness, and vulnerability,” Weiler said.

While Well, I’ll Let You Go relied on minimalist, somewhat abstract theatricality, The Saviors is grounded in detailed, specific realism. Crucially, the narrative is anchored by actual teens: 13- and 14-year-old lead actors Ivan Howe and Julius Rinzel, who perform alongside adult cast members Crystal Finn and Stanley Simons. The decision to spotlight youth is a deeply personal one for Weiler, whose own history as a young performer directly shaped the script.

“I was a child actor in Chicago, and I began working on this play not long after,” Weiler said. “Part of this play was a response to the frustration I felt during times when I didn’t feel trusted with material or felt talked down to. It’s also a celebration of the few opportunities that did allow me to do that, and what a positive, amazing experience that was for me as a kid.”

Weiler added that the process of developing this play was “honestly, a healing experience.”

Serio shares this passionate commitment to treating child actors as true artistic collaborators. “The production is in response to an ecosystem of art-making, especially in theatre, where children on stage are often relegated to props, that they are not ever deputized with real, complex situations and characters,” Serio said.

“I am excited about an audience being both surprised and, maybe, uncomfortable as they watch two 13- and 14-year-old boys navigate real-world situations that Bubba and I both found ourselves having to navigate as young men, but don’t often see those experiences put on stage with this level of authenticity.”

The intense, private world these young men traverse in The Saviors unfolds in the shadow of the Catholic Church, a setting that functions as both a physical sanctuary and a psychological trap. This environment also draws heavily on the creative team’s own backgrounds.

“Bubba and I both grew up going to Catholic school,” Serio said. “The church offers a kind of structure, liberation, and meaning to characters’ lives in The Saviors, but it is also the thing that sometimes holds them back from that liberation and from a more complex understanding of their situations and the world around them.”

For Weiler, writing the play meant confronting the doctrines of his youth using the desperate, searching theological language of his teenage characters.

“This is a play in which I am sort of wrestling with the faith I grew up in and really trying to hold the beauty and pain of it at the same time,” Weiler said. “I struggle with Catholicism for a myriad of reasons, not in small part because it can be a hard and sometimes dangerous place for a young queer kid to grow up.”

Yet even as he questions the institution, Weiler recognizes the profound human need for the connection church — and not just the religious kind — provides. “At the end of the day, church is a place to gather, and be in community, and think big thoughts about your life, and what it means to be human, and what else there might be,” Weiler said. “Now, as an adult, my chosen place to do that is the theatre.”

By turning the stage into a space for communal reflection and placing trusting, complex dialogue into the hands of young actors, Weiler and Serio have created a piece of theatre which demands that audiences view adolescence with an unflinching level of respect. As The Saviors prepares for its summer run, it promises to leave audiences contemplating the vulnerability of youth and the enduring weight of the institutions that raise them.

“There is a maturing and a push into adulthood for both of them,” Serio said of the characters. “I hope these two boys are able to hold onto some of their youth as they go on to adulthood, and I hope the play will catalyze a similar reflection in an audience.”

Get The Saviors tickets now.

Photo credit: Bubba Weiler (left in top image), Jack Serio (right in top image), and the company of The Saviors in rehearsal. (Photos by Ahron R. Foster)