ENGLEWOOD, FLA. and NEW YORK CITY: The Hermitage Artist Retreat and Roundabout Theatre Company have formed a collaborative partnership designed to help create new works and launch them on a pathway to production. The ongoing collaboration will support playwrights developing original works for Roundabout with the gift of time and space on the Hermitage’s campus. Some of the theatre world’s most exciting new voices will have the opportunity to explore their work on the historic Hermitage campus before a potential production at Roundabout. The inaugural year of this new partnership will launch this summer with playwrights York Walker and Dave Harris.
“We are honored to be launching this exciting collaboration with Roundabout Theatre Company,” said Hermitage artistic director and CEO Andy Sandberg in a statement. “We are proud to be a leading national incubator for new and original works, and as Roundabout deepens its commitment to championing new voices, this partnership provides emerging and innovative playwrights with a ‘full circle’ journey.”
York Walker is a playwright and screenwriter from Chicago. He is the inaugural recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Colman Domingo Award and is also a member of Marcus Gardley’s New Wave Writer’s Workshop. His work includes The Séance, Covenant, White Shoes, Summer Of ’63, and Of Dreams To Come. His play Covenant is scheduled to premiere as part of the Roundabout Underground series in the fall of 2023.
Dave Harris is a poet and playwright based in Philadelphia whose work Tambo & Bones premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2022. Other works for the stage include Exception to the Rule and Everybody Black. His first feature film, Summertime, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released in 2021. Selected honors include the 2019 Ollie Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Award and Mark Twain Award from The Kennedy Center, the International Commendation for the Bruntwood Prize, the Venturous Fellowship from The Lark, and a Cave Canem poetry fellowship amongst others. Dave is writing the feature adaptation of The Fortress of Solitude alongside several other feature and television projects. His first full-length collection of poetry, Patricide, was published by Button Poetry.
The Hermitage is a nonprofit artist retreat located in Manasota Key, Fla., inviting accomplished artists across multiple disciplines for residencies on its beachfront campus. The Hermitage seeks to inspire and foster the most influential and culturally consequential art and artists of our time. Each year, the Hermitage awards the $30,000 Hermitage Greenfield Prize for a new work of art, the $35,000 Hermitage Major Theater Award for an original theatre commission, and the Aspen Music Festival’s Hermitage Prize in Composition.
Roundabout Theatre Company is a nonprofit theatre company based in midtown Manhattan with a mission of celebrating the power of theatre by spotlighting classics from the past, cultivating new works of the present, and educating minds for the future.
