NEW YORK CITY: The Thornton Wilder Society will present the annual Thornton Wilder Prize to artistic director Michel Hausmann and the company he co-founded, Miami New Drama. The awards ceremony will take place at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York on Nov. 14. The event will feature an onstage dialogue about Miami New Drama’s multilingual 2017 production of Wilder’s Our Town, along with a discussion about Wilder’s life, career, and enduring popularity among Hausmann, playwright Sarah Ruhl, and Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder, moderated by journalist Jeremy McCarter.
Miami New Drama is the resident theatre company at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach. Under Hausmann’s leadership, Miami New Drama produced the first trilingual production—in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English—of Thornton Wilder’s classic drama Our Town.
The Thornton Wilder Society is dedicated to preserving and expanding the legacy of the three-time Pulitzer-winning writer, the only one to receive awards for both fiction and drama. The society seeks to support projects which emphasize the timeless importance of Thornton Wilder’s literature and drama to world culture. The society publishes the Thornton Wilder Journal twice a year and periodically presents a prize to artists who reflect the values espoused by Wilder. The 2022-23 season is being celebrated as the 125th anniversary of Wilder’s birth.
