The 2014 Pulitzer Prizes were announced in April by Columbia University in New York City, and the winner in drama was The Flick by Annie Baker (scheduled to be published in July by TCG Books). Baker earned a prize of $10,000. The category finalists were Madeleine George’s The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, and Fun Home, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori.
In June, Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout was one of the four winners of the Bradley Prize, sponsored by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The award recognizes innovative thinkers and carries a $250,000 purse.
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Creative Capital, both based in NYC, have announced the winners of the inaugural Doris Duke Impact Awards, carrying $80,000 each. The winners in the theatre category were Julia Jarcho, Dean Moss, Lucia Neare, Tina Satter, Johnny Simons, Michael Sommers and Cristal Chanelle Truscott. In addition, the winners of the third annual Doris Duke Artist Awards, worth $275,000 each, included theatre figures John Collins, David Henry Hwang, Melanie Joseph, Nancy Keystone, Lisa Kron, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Peggy Shaw.
The 24th annual Kleban Prize for emerging musical theatre artists was awarded in June to Nathan Tysen, for most promising lyricist, and Arthur Perlman, for most promising librettist.
Lauren Gunderson’s I and You won the $25,000 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, given to writers whose play premiered outside NYC in 2013. The award is presented by the American Theatre Critics Association. In addition, two citations carrying $7,500 each were awarded to Christopher Demos-Brown and Martín Zimmerman.
Mona Mansour is the recipient of the 2014 Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award, for Middle Eastern–American playwrights, and presented by San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions, NYC’s Lark Play Development Center and Chicago’s Silk Road Rising. The prize comes with a $10,000 fellowship to write a new play, artistic development support, and a possible production at Silk Road Rising and Golden Thread. Honorable mention went to Bianca Bagatourian, Ismail Khalidi, Daria Polatin, Misha Shulman and Zohar Tirosh-Polk.
Janine Nabers has won the 2014 Yale Drama Series competition for her play Serial Black Face. She will receive $10,000, publication by Yale University Press and a reading at Lincoln Center Theater in New York. The prize recognizes unpublished plays.
The Peabody Awards, for excellence in radio and TV broadcasting, presented in May in New York City, featured among this year’s recipients the HBO documentary was Six by Sondheim, directed by James Lapine and produced by Lapine and former New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich.
Diane Paulus, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez and Amy Adams were the theatre artists who made the list of Time magazine’s 2014 Time 100, an annual selection of the 100 most influential people in the world.
A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle has awarded its 2014 New Play Award to Jason Grotefor his play Shostakovich. The award comes with $2,500 and workshop readings (which were held in May).
Martín Zimmerman’s play Let Me Count the Ways is the winner of Philadelphia Theatre Company’s third annual Terrence McNally New Play Award. The prize includes a year of development support at PTC and readings.
The Sundance Institute in Utah has selected the nine projects that will be developed in its 2014 Theatre Lab this month. They include The Good Book by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, The Last of the Little Hours by Annie Baker, Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau, and So Go the Ghosts of Mexico, Part Two by Matthew Paul Olmos.
The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center has announced the selections for its 2014 National Playwrights Conference and its National Music Theater Conference. Among the works to be developed and presented this month at the center in Waterford, Conn., are The War Dept., a musical by Jim Bauer and Ruth Bauer; A Power Play or What’s Its Name by A. Rey Pamatmat; and Bright Half Life by Tanya Barfield.
Theatre Development Fund in New York City has selected costume designer Deborah M. Dryden as the recipient of its 2014 TDF/Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award for costume design.
The 2014 Michael Merritt Awards, recognizing outstanding accomplishment in theatre design, have been announced. The Michael Merritt Award winner is costume designer Susan E. Mickey; the Michael Maggio Emerging Designer Award winner is costume designer Izumi Inaba; and the inaugural Robert Christen Award winner for excellence in technical collaboration is stage manager Malcolm Ewen.
The 2014 Lilly Award for women in the theatre was handed in June to awardees Kelli O’Hara, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Dominique Morisseau, Jeanine Tesori and the cast of the A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway.
New York’s Playwrights Horizons has awarded a one-year residency to playwright Heidi Schreck. As a resident at the theatre, Schreck will receive a salary and benefits, so that she can focus on developing a new play. In addition, the company has commissioned a new work from Danai Gurira.
Peter Maloney and Mare Winningham have received the annual Richard Seff Awards, presented by Actors’ Equity Foundation. The award recognizes a veteran male and female actor in a supporting role in a Broadway or Off-Broadway production.
Whitney Bashor and Steven Boyer received the Actors’ Equity’s annual Clarence Derwent Awards.The awards recognize most promising female and male actors in New York.
Dominic Chianese was presented with the Laurette Taylor Award in May in NYC. The award was created in 2009 to cele-brate the artistic contribution of the late stage actress and those who have made similar contributions.
Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., presented its annual Pell Awards in June for artistic excellence in Rhode Island and the New England region. Nuala Pell, Richard Jenkins and Sharon Jenkins received the Pell Award for lifetime achievement in the arts; Mary Paula Hunter received the Charles Sullivan Award for distinguished service in the arts; and Jeffrey Osborne received the New England Pell Award for excellence.
Ars Nova in NYC has named its 2014 resident artists. Among them are the new playwrights of the Play Group (including Liza Birkenmeier, Suzanne Heathcote and Jonathan Payne), the new musical-theatre teams in Uncharted (including César Alvarez, Cory Finley and Jeremy Lloyd) and 2014 director-in-residence Andrew Neisler.
The winner of Repertorio Español’s annual Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition is Carlos Murillo and his play Your Name Will Follow You Home. Murillo’s play will be produced on the New York company’s stages this fall. The second and third place winners, respectively, were Joselo Arroyo and Matt Barbot.
Actor Mark Ruffalo is the 2014 artist-in-residence at the New School for Drama in New York City.
Hartford Stage of Connecticut’s Financial Literary Program won the 2014 Excellence in Financial Literacy Education Award for children’s education program of the year, presented by the Institute of Financial Literacy.
In April, Illinois State Representative Robert Martwick presented his Good Neighbor Business of the Year Award to the Gift Theatre Company of Chicago.
At Red Bull Theater’s Running of the Red Bulls Benefit in June in NYC, Juliet Rylance, ART/New York and Olympia Dukakis received 2014 Matador Awards for excellence in classical theatre.
