Zinnie Harris and Stephen Karam Honored with 2015 Berwin Lee Awards

Playwrights Zinnie Harris and Stephen Karam were announced last week as the second-ever winners of the Berwin Lee Playwrights Award. Trustees Dorothy Berwin, Mark Lee and Tom Kirdahy made the announcement, and BroadwayWorld.com notes that "The Berwin Lee Award was created to foster and promote the craft of playwriting in both the United States and the United Kingdom and to encourage the writing and production of plays."

For this award, the trustees are looking for playwrights whose work has not yet been produced on Broadway or in London's West End. They have chosen one American winner -- Pennsylvania native Karam -- and one winner from the United Kingdom -- Harris, who currently resides in Edinburgh -- and each received a prize of $25,000 as part of the award. Those monies were offered as a commission of sorts, to allow the selected playwrights the time and freedom they need to write whatever they want, no strings attached.

Both playwrights are rising stars on both sides of the Atlantic, with Harris's The Wheel, a play originally commissioned by the National Theatre of Scotland, enjoying a major Chicago production starring Joan Allen at Steppenwolf; and Karam's Sons of the Prophet nominated for a 2012 Pulitzer Prize and staged at the Roundabout in a production that catapulted Santino Fontana into stardom.

On a personal note, both playwrights are particular favorites of mine. Harris's Further Than the Furthest Thing and Karam's Speech & Debate, which is like a prequel to Glee before there was a Glee, have landed in my "wish pile."

Here are the official bios released with the award news:

Playwright Zinnie Harris

Zinnie Harris is a playwright and theatre director. Her celebrated early play Further Than the Furthest Thing (which toured from the Traverse theatre to the National Theatre) won her the Peggy Ramsay Playwriting and John Whiting Award in 2001. Her most recent play, How to Hold Your Breath, premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood downstairs in 2015. Other plays include The Wheel (2011, National Theatre of Scotland), which won a Fringe First; an adaptation of A Doll's House (2009, Donmar Warehouse); Midwinter (2004, RSC), which won an Arts Foundation Fellowship Prize for Playwriting; and By Many Wounds (1999, Hampstead Theatre). Zinnie's television work includes two 90 minute dramas for Channel 4, Born With Two Mothers and Richard Is My Boyfriend; episodes for the BBC One Drama Series SPOOKS; and work as lead writer on the series Partners in Crime (based on the Agatha Christie novels Tommy and Tuppence), for Endor / BBC 1 (to be broadcast in 2015), starring David Walliams.

Pllaywright Stephen Karam

Stephen Karam is the author of Sons of the Prophet, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner Awards for Best Play. Other plays include Speech & Debate (the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground), columbinus, and Dark Sisters, an original chamber opera with composer Nico Muhly. His new play, The Humans, premiered in Chicago at American Theater Company and will open in New York at Roundabout Theatre Company in October of 2015. Stephen is a MacDowell Colony fellow, and the recipient of the inaugural Sam Norkin Drama Desk Award. Born and raised in Scranton, PA, he's a graduate of Brown University.

Last year's winners in the first year of the Berwin Lee Awards were Bathsheba Doran from the United States and Lucy Kirkwood from the UK. 

Opening This Week: JB, OK and SONS

I'm trying to find a through-line to describe the three shows that open this weekend on area stages -- Archibald MacLeish's J.B., the good old Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and Stephen Karam's Sons of the Prophet -- but those are some pretty disparate shows.

Although Oklahoma! was written and performed first among the three, it's J.B. that looks back the farthest for its literary material. Stick an O between that J and B, and you'll see where MacLeish's play comes from. And that would be the Book of Job in the Bible. You will probably remember Job as a very put-upon guy, one whose faith is tested by God in a sort of celestial bet with Satan, whereby Satan takes away Job's children, his wealth and his physical health to see if he can get Job to turn his back on God.

Job is mightily tested, but he remains strong in his faith. So that's your happily ever after. I don't find it all that happy myself or a terribly good reason to have faith, but... I am guessing I am not the intended audience. I may be closer to MacLeish's intended audience, however, since his version of Job, which sets the action inside a circus tent, has a somewhat different ending.

Archibald MacLeish's J.B. opens on February 21 at ISU's Westhoff Theatre. And, yes, it will be circusey. Matthew Scott Campbell directs this production, with Tommy Malouf as Job, and Andrew Rogalny, Jr. and Matthew Hallahan as the competing forces of good and evil.

Sons of the Prophet, a new play by up-and-comer Stephen Karam, also opens on the 21st. This one is directed by Gary Ambler for Urbana's Station Theatre, with Joel Higgins and David Mor as the sons in the title. Their prophet is not anyone Biblical, however, but instead Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the famous book of poetry called The Prophet. Family legend says that Joseph and Charlie Douaihy are indirectly related to Gibran, and that fact is Joseph's toe in the door to get a book of his own published. But hard luck follows the Douaihy family, not unlike what happens to Job up there. As Karam examines "how people endure the unendurable" through the tragedy and joy in one Lebanese-American family, Sons of the Prophet finds the humor and compassion in humanity.

And then there's Oklahoma! Based on a 1931 play called Green Grow the Lilacs, written by Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma! is a musical exploration of cowboys and farmers, American expansion west, romance down on the farm, girls who cain't say no, all boosted by the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein score and the exuberant choreography of Agnes de Mille. The poster for ISU's production, which is directed by Richard Corley, looks like he's bringing in some jump, jive and wail to pull the show forward from its 1906 setting to something that more approximates the time period of the original Broadway production, which premiered in 1943. Those definitely look like jitterbuggers over there on top of the state. On the other hand, the cowboy seems to riding a John Deere and I don't know that riding lawn mowers were hanging around in 1943. But it would certainly seem to indicate that this will be a more modern Oklahoma! than most.

Whether it's extra jazzy or original recipe Oklahoma!, the show will open February 22 at the Illinois State University Center for the Performing Arts. For tickets or more information, check out the event's Facebook page here.

Auditions December 2 and 4 for SONS OF THE PROPHET in Urbana

Area actors need to warm up those monologues! Illinois State University is in the middle of auditions for all its winter and spring shows right this minute, and Heartland Theatre is holding auditions for Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still in mid-December. Plus Community Players' will be looking for performers for Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor December 10 and 11.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, December 2 and Monday, December 3, Urbana's Station Theatre will hold auditions for Sons of the Prophet, a new comedy-drama from playwright Stephen Karam. A finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sons of the Prophet was billed as "a refreshingly honest take on how we cope with wounds that just won't heal" when it played at New York's Roundabout Theatre. The Roundabout's poster for the show -- with its garden gnome sporting a black eye -- was so adorable I'm posting it here just for kicks. That production was quite successful, amassing lots of wins and nominations for Obies, Lucille Lortel Awards, Drama Desks and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Lead actor Santino Fontana was especially well received.

The Station has picked up the Roundabout's material on the play for their audition flyer, with this description: "If to live is to suffer, then Joseph Douaihy is more alive than most. With unexplained chronic pain and the fate of his reeling family on his shoulders, Joseph's health, sanity, and insurance premium are on the line. In an age when modern medicine has a cure for just about everything, Sons of the Prophet is the funniest play about human suffering you're likely to see."

Karam's play's title refers to Kahlil Gibran's book "The Prophet," with the play's action organized around the chapter headings in that poetic piece of pop philosophy. Joseph Douaihy is one of two brothers in the play, the older at 29, with Charles only 18. The family is Lebanese-American and claims a distant familial connection to Gibran, which informs part of the plot when Joseph is pushed to write a book himself, but is challenged by his own mysterious illness and his mentally unstable editor, who also happens to be his boss and therefore holds the key to his health insurance.

Joseph, who is gay, lives with Charles, who is also gay, and their ornery uncle in a not-at-all nice area of Pennsylvania, thrown together after Bill Douaihy, Joseph and Charlie's dad, passes away. How he dies is important, but tricky to explain. It seems a local football player left a fake deer on the highway as a prank, Bill saw it while driving and swerved to avoid it, had a crash, and then died a week later in the hospital. But he died of a heart attack. It's all part of Karam's inquiry into the crazy nature of Fate or Luck or Destiny or whatever you want to call it, as those cosmic forces keep ladling out big helpings of bad news to the Douaihy family. If the family is drowning in tragedy, what sets Sons of the Prophet apart is the comedy, and how Joseph and his kin manage to find a life raft in humor and in each other.

Sons of the Prophet will be directed by Gary Ambler for the Station Theatre, with performances from February 21 to March 9. Roles available include Joseph, Charlie and Uncle Bill, as well as Vin, the 18-year-old football star who caused the accident; Gloria, 59, the crazy editor; and Timothy, a local TV reporter who offers romantic complications for Joseph.

Auditions, which will consist of cold readings from the script, will be held at the Station Theatre at 223 North Broadway in Urbana on Sunday, December 2, from 2 to 5 pm and Monday, December 3, from 7 to 10 pm. For more information, you are asked to email Gary Ambler at garysambler@gmail.com