Playwright Lynn Nottage Wins Her 2nd Pulitzer Prize for SWEAT

The 2017 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, including three awards -- for international reporting on Vladimir Putin and Russia's criminal tactics to wield influence in other countries, C. J. Chivers' feature writing about a Viet Nam vet caught up in the legal system, and freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak's breaking news photography of a Chicago mother and son -- to The New York Times; a Pulitzer in national reporting to David A. Fahrenthold of The Washington Post for his stories on Donald Trump's shady use of his own charities; an award to the New York Daily News and ProPublica in the public service category for Sarah Ryley's stories on eviction abuses; and an editorial writing prize to Art Cullen of the tiny Storm Lake Gazette in Storm Lake, Iowa.

Theatre critic Hilton Als of The New Yorker was also singled out for his "bold and original reviews," including his pieces on bullies and pop psychology in Dear Evan Hansen, two looks at the "maddening sexist, racist, restless, complicated, and important dramas" of Eugene O'Neill, and "Gay Reflections, Onstage" in four very different theatrical pieces.When congratulating Als on his prize, The New Yorker's twitter account linked to a beautiful musing he wrote on the movie Moonlight, showcasing the lyrical style and deft analysis that characterizes Als' writing.

On the "Letters, Drama & Music" side of the Pulitzer equation, Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Underground Railroad, "a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America." Whitehead's National Book Award winning novel creates a physical railway, with tracks and tunnels underneath American soil, taking former slave Cora from state to state, from one abomination to the next, one step ahead of dangerous slave catchers, as she tries to escape to both metaphorical and actual freedom.

And in my favorite category, Drama, Lynn Nottage, who happens to be one of my favorite playwrights, has won her second Pulitzer Prize, this time for Sweat, her "nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream." Nottage is the first woman playwright to receive the Pulitzer twice.

Lynn Nottage

Sweat was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of its United States History Cycle. After the Oregon production and a run at Arena Stage in Washington DC, Sweat moved to New York's Public Theater, where it was popular enough to be extended three times. The accolades the play received, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, earned Nottage her first trip to Broadway at the same time Paula Vogel, another Pulitzer winner, made it with her play Indecent. Plays written by female playwrights on Broadway are enough of a rarity that The New York Times interviewed both Nottage and Vogel about the phenomenon.

The Public Theater production of Sweat, directed by Kate Whoriskey, moved to Broadway's Studio 54, where it opened in previews March 4, 2017. Its official opening was March 26.

For more information on all of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners, check out the Pulitzer site here.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama Goes to Lin-Manuel Miranda and HAMILTON

Hamilton, the incredibly popular musical created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has been awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer committee calls Hamilton, "A landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible."

Hamilton becomes only the ninth musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama since it started in 1918, after Of Thee I Sing* by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin, awarded in 1932; South Pacific by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan, in 1950; Fiorello! with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, awarded in 1960; How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Abe Burrows,  in 1962; A Chorus Line, by by Michael Bennett, James Kirkwood, Jr., Marvin Hamlisch, Nicholas Dante and Edward Kleban, awarded in 1976, Sunday in the Park with George, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine, in 1985; Jonathan Larson's Rent in 1996, and Next to Normal, by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, in 2010.

This year's finalists were Gloria, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "whip-smart satire" that looks at media, violence and ambition, and The Humans, Stephen Karam's unsettling drama about a middle-class family in decline.


*The Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing did not include George Gershwin, who composed its music. Richard Rodgers, who wrote the score for South Pacific, was a recipient, however, as the Pulitzer committee had decided by that point that a musical's music was an important part of its overall worthiness for the award.

Stephen Adly Guigis Wins Pulitzer for BETWEEN RIVERSIDE AND CRAZY

Between Riverside and Crazy, Stephen Adly Guirgis' darkly comic play that had runs at both the Atlantic Theater Company and the off-Broadway Second Stage Theatre in New York, has been named the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, awarded to "a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life."

The Pulitzer committee describes Guirgis' play as "a nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death." Its New York production earned multiple Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Award nominations, including nods for the play, lead actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, director Austin Pendleton, featured actress Liza Colon-Zayas, featured actor Victor Almanzar and scenic designer Walt Spangler.

Between Riverside and Crazy will be part of Steppenwolf Theater's 2015-16 season with a production scheduled to open in Chicago in June, 2016. Yasen Peyankov will direct a cast that includes James Vincent Meredith and Tim Hopper. Last year's Pulitzer recipient was Annie Baker for The Flick, which will also appear in Steppenwolf's 2015-16 season.

Guirgis's previous plays include The Motherfucker with the Hat, which played on Broadway with a cast that included Chris Rock and Bobby Cannavale, Our Lady of 121st Street, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Jesus Hopped the A Train. Guirgis also made a cameo appearance in Birdman, last year's Oscar-winning Best Picture.

The other finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama were Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime, described as "a sly and surprising work about technology and artificial intelligence told through images and ideas that resonate," and Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, 3), "a distinctive and lyrical epic about a slave during the Civil War that deftly takes on questions of identity, power and freedom with a blend of humor and dignity."

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama comes with a $10,000 check to the winning playwright.

Annie Baker's THE FLICK Takes the Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2014

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 2014 has gone to Annie Baker's play The Flick, which played at Playwrights Horizons in early 2013. The Pulitzer is awarded to "a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life." In choosing it, the Pulitzer committee described The Flick as "a thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage." The Playwrights Horizons run was directed by frequent Annie Baker collaborator Sam Gold.

The Flick garnered praise from critics like Charles Isherwood in The New York Times, who noted that this "lovingly observed play will sink deep into your consciousness, and probably stay there for a while." Other prominent sources were equally enamored of the play, and it won Baker an Obie as well as the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

But it was not without its detractors. Baker purposely wrote a play without traditional theatrical action, where characters are revealed through menial, everyday activities ("walking and sweeping and mopping and dust-pan banging," according to Baker) and by what they don't say as much as what they do. She wrote about characters -- regular old people -- she felt are often left out of American theater, and she let The Flick spool out in its own time, which was about three hours. With the combination of length, languid pace and frequent silences, some Playwrights Horizons' patrons complained, walked out at intermission and threatened to cancel their subscriptions. And then Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Tim Sanford sent an email blast to all 3000 subscribers to explain why and how The Flick suited the new-play and playwright focused theater and why they were standing behind it even in the face of so much criticism. No apologies, just an explanation. Still, that's not something that happens every day.

Given all of that, the Pulitzer committee seems to be telling us that they are behind game-changers and boundary-breakers like Annie Baker and The Flick.

It is worth noting that the other two nominees for this year's Pulitzer were also created by female theater artists. Those runners-up were Madeleine George's The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, "a cleverly constructed play that uses several historical moments -- from the 1800s to the 2010s – to meditate on the technological advancements that bring people together and tear them apart," and the musical Fun Home, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, which the Pulitzer site calls "a poignant musical adaptation of a graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, exploring sexual identity amid complicated family constraints and relationships." Fun Home enjoyed a Public Theatre production that starred Tony Award-winner Michael Cerveris and three-time Tony Award-nominee Judy Kuhn.

Both The Flick and Fun Home made Playbill's list of possibilities for the Pulitzer, but Watson Intelligence, another Playwrights Horizons show, was perhaps less expected. In another interesting footnote, playwrights Lisa Kron and Madeleine George are a couple, married last year, meaning there are two Pulitzer citations in their household in 2014.

PS Classics has produced a cast recording for Fun Home if you're interested in revisiting or understanding its "shining clarity that lights up the night."

Ayad Akhtar's DISGRACED Wins the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

This year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been awarded to Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, a play which premiered in Chicago in January, 2012, at the American Theater Company. Director Kimberly Senior then took the production to New York, where it played in the Clair Tow Theater at Lincoln Center from September to December, 2012.

Disgraced concerns Amir Kapoor, a Pakistani-American lawyer who has enjoyed a great deal of success within a prestigious New York firm. He lives on the Upper West Side in a beautiful apartment with a beautiful (white) wife, enjoying all the material accoutrements that accompany his status as a big-shot lawyer. To achieve that success, he's suppressed and hidden the parts of his identity related to Islam. But his wife, who is an artist, has incorporated Muslim motifs into her work. And when she throws a dinner party for a mixed group of guests, all those forces of identity, religion and culture collide.

As you can see from the poster image from Lincoln Center reproduced here, Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show played Amir in the New York production. To see video clips from that production, click here or here (under the "Works" tab).

Other plays considered for this year's Pulitzer were Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn, which the Pulitzer committee calls "a searing comedy that examines the psyches of two women in midlife as they ruefully question the differing choices they have made," and Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles, "a drama that shows acute understanding of human idiosyncrasy as a spiky 91-year-old locks horns with her rudderless 21-year-old grandson who shows up at her Greenwich Village apartment after a disastrous cross-country bike trip."

TCG Will Publish Pulitzer Prize Winner "Water by the Spoonful"

Theatre Communications Group has announced that they will be publishing "Water by the Spoonful," the Quiara Alegría Hudes play which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Quiara Alegría Hudes

TCG plans to release the play through its TCG Books imprint on August 1, 2012, followed by Hudes' previous play, "Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue," on August 15.  "Elliot" and "Water" represent the first and second parts of a trilogy involving an American soldier sent to Iraq, with "Elliot" looking at three generations of one soldier's family and how war (and music) have shaped them, and "Water" taking up that soldier's story once he is back from Iraq, weaving him into a narrative about how we form connections in cyberspace.

Writing for the New York Times , Phoebe Hoban called "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue," "that rare and rewarding thing: a theater work that succeeds on every level, while creating something new."

About "Water by the Spoonful," TCG writes, "Water by the Spoonful follows Elliot, a 19-year-old marine, as he struggles to find his place in the world upon returning from Iraq. While he copes with the monotony of day-to-day life, somewhere in a chat room, four recovering addicts forge an unbreakable bond. The boundaries of family and friendship are stretched across time and cyberspace in this second installment of Hudes’s trilogy."

They also note that the first two scenes of  "Water by the Spoonful" can be read on Hudes’s website.

The third part of the trilogy, "The Happiest Song Plays Last," is scheduled for next April and May at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama Goes to Quiara Alegría Hudes for "Water by the Spoonful"

Winners of the Pulitzer Prizes for 2012 were announced yesterday, with Quiara Alegría Hudes taking the Drama prize for her play "Water by the Spoonful," which the Pulitzer committee described as, "an imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia."

Quiara Alegría Hudes

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama may be awarded annually to "a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life," and it comes with a $10,000 added prize.

Hudes' play premiered last year at the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut. A previous play, "Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue," which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2007, is the first in a planned trilogy, with "Water by the Spoonful" as the second play. And the third part of the trilogy, "The Happiest Song Plays Last," is scheduled for next April and May at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.

"Water by the Spoonful" spotlights characters around the world who interact by way of an internet chat room, with the main focus on the troubled veteran in Philadelphia and his mother, who has demons of her own.

Other finalist plays this year were "Other Desert Cities," by Jon Robin Baitz, also on the Goodman's schedule for next year, and "Sons of the Prophet," by Stephen Karam.