SAN FRANCISCO: Playwright Marcus Gardley has been awarded the Will Glickman Award for his play The House that will not Stand. The prize, presented by the service organization Theatre Bay Area, is given annually to a play that had its world premiere in the Bay Area. House had its premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last February.
The award, which comes with $4,000, will be presented on April 13 at Theatre Bay Area’s annual conference. The play will also be printed in Theatre Bay Area magazine.
“I’m extremely proud of The House that will not Stand’s world premiere at Berkeley Rep and eternally grateful to have participated in the Ground Floor, which provided the creative space and artistic support to develop the play,” said Gardley in a statement. “The play has been enthusiastically received at Yale Rep and Tricycle Theatre in London. But this recognition from the Bay Area theatre community where I have deep roots is truly an honor.”
The House that will not Stand was loosely inspired by Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. The show is set in 1836 New Orleans and is a comedic drama about the lives of free women of color.
“Marcus is an Oakland native, now one of the most exciting young writers in the country, who returns often to work in the Bay Area,” said Brad Erickson, Theatre Bay Area Theatre’s executive director, in a statement. “Theatremakers in the Bay Area are proud to count Marcus as one of our own, and we are all enormously blessed to have so many of Marcus’s beautiful plays being developed or premiering here.”
This is the first Glickman Award for Gardley and the fifth for Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Theatre Bay Area also announced the runners-up for the prize: Hir by Taylor Mac (Magic Theatre); Hundred Days by Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson and Kate E. Ryan (Z Space) and The Scion by Brian Copeland (The Marsh).
The award is named after playwright and screenwriter Will Glickman. The winner is chosen by a panel of top Bay Area theatre critics: Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Avila of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News, Chad Jones of TheaterDogs.net and Sam Hurwitt of KQED Arts and the Marin Independent Journal. Previous winners include Ideation by Aaron Loeb, The Hundred Flowers Project by Christopher Chen, Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro and Angels in America: Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner.
