NEW YORK CITY: American playwrights Cherríe Moraga and Richard Wesley have been announced as the 2024 recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards. The industry-wide Legacy Playwrights Initiative (LPI) shines a spotlight on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work deserves greater visibility, including those who have fallen out of the public eye. LPI offers a pathway to rediscovery for honorees and their writing and provides financial support.
A California-based writer, Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist, and memoirist who initiated her public writing life as the co-editor of the 1981 seminal feminist text, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. As a political and literary essayist, Moraga has published Native Country of the Heart – A Memoir (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (Duke); and Loving in the War Years, The Last Generation; and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Haymarket Books, Chicago). Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the Barnard College Medal of Distinction, and both the American Studies Association’s and Lambda’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, among many other honors. As a playwright, she has earned two Fund for New American Plays Awards, the NEA’s Playwrights’ Fellowship, as well as a Drama-logue, Critics Circle, and the Pen West Award. In 2021, Moraga received the Distinguished Career Theater Artist Award from the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation in New York City.
Richard Wesley was born in Newark, N.J., and graduated from Howard University in 1967. He studied playwriting under the tutelage of Owen Dodson and Ted Shine. A member of the New Lafayette Theater from 1970 through 1973, he served as managing editor of its Black Theater magazine. He was awarded a Drama Desk Award for his 1971 stage play The Black Terror. His 1978 play The Mighty Gents ran briefly on Broadway. His 1989 play The Talented Tenth brought him his fourth AUDELCO Award for outstanding play. In 2013, he was commissioned by the Trilogy Opera Company of Newark, N.J. to write the libretto for the opera, Papa Doc, with music composed by Dorothy Rudd Moore, and adapted from an essay by Edwidge Danticat. Other librettos for Trilogy include: Five, with music composed by Anthony Davis, Kenyatta, with composer Trent Johnson, Scott, Garner, and Gray Says Jimmy Baldwin, composed by Dwane Fulton, and Booker T and W.E.B., composed by Julius Wilson. A new version of Five called The Central Park Five was performed June 2019 by the Long Beach Opera Company at the Warner Theater in San Pedro, California. Wesley’s most recent play, Autumn, received its premiere at the Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick in April of 2015. A subsequent production was produced in New York by the Billie Holiday Theater in 2016 and received the AUDELCO Award for Dramatic Production of the Year.
The Legacy Playwrights Initiative is supported by the Dramatists Guild Foundation and a leadership grant from Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation.
Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF) is a national charity that fuels the future of American theatre by supporting the writers who create it. DGF fosters playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists at all stages of their careers. DGF sponsors educational programs; provides awards, grants, and stipends; offers free space to create new works; and gives emergency aid to writers in need of immediate support.
NEW YORK CITY: Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF) has announced that musical theatre composer Daniel Lazour is the 2024 recipient of the Stephen Schwartz Award. The award is a pledge to the future of musical theatre, given annually to a musical theatre writer whose voice is seen as critical to the continued success of the craft. The recipient is granted $10,000 in unconditional support of their work.
Lazour’s current project, We Live in Cairo, written with his brother Patrick Lazour, recently opened at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). Additional projects include Night Side Songs (UTR/PTC/ART 2025), a stage adaptation of the film The Lunchbox, and a movie musical, Challenger: An American Dream. He received a B.A. in music from Columbia University. He plays guitar, piano, and tin whistle and releases music regularly with his brother Patrick as The Lazours.
Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF) is a national charity that fuels the future of American theatre by supporting the writers who create it. DGF fosters playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists at all stages of their careers. DGF sponsors educational programs; provides awards, grants, and stipends; offers free space to create new works; and gives emergency aid to writers in need of immediate support.
AKRON, OH: The National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) today announces Shamel Pitts as the second recipient of the $50,000 Knight Choreography Prize. Pitts will receive an unrestricted cash award of $30,000, plus $20,000 in programmatic support over two years, to be co-designed with NCCAkron.
Shamel Pitts is a choreographer and dancer developing multidisciplinary performance-based works centered on collaboration and imagining new ways of being in the world. Pitts is the founder and artistic director of TRIBE, a group of artists working in a wide range of media, including lighting design, video-mapping projection technologies, electronic music composition, cinematography, and video art. TRIBE’s works emerge from the collective artistic vision of its members. Pitts brings his unique choreographic style to bear on the group’s commitment to envisioning a future free from the constraints of historical oppression, particularly for the African diaspora. In Touch of RED (2022), a duet for two male dancers, Pitts explores how men relate to each other and to the world. For this work, the artists of TRIBE and their collaborators ingeniously transform the theatre into a boxing ring and then into a dance club. Through his vision of cooperative creation, Pitts is creating new models for promoting self-discovery and freedom through art.
Made possible by Knight Foundation, this award is designed to support the artistic experimentation and career longevity of choreographers in the United States. Each year the award will honor a living choreographer whose body of work is distinguished not only for their artistry but also for their originality of thought and impact. The award celebrates choreographers who provide significant contributions to the dance field, expand audiences for dance, and ensure the artform has a prominent place in U.S. culture. NCCAkron invited dance artists, dance stakeholders, and NCCAkron alumni across the U.S. to nominate a choreographer for this inaugural award.
LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles New Play Project has announced this year’s grant recipients, whose work pushes boundaries and engages audiences in profound conversations. They are Shualee Cook with After Hours Theatre Company, Roger Q. Mason with Skylight Theatre Company, Ankita Raturi with Artists at Play, and Amy Tofte with Little Fish Theatre.
The Los Angeles New Play Project supports new and original works presented on small stages within Los Angeles County. Each playwright receives a grant of $20,000. Each of the submitting producers will receive an additional $20,000 to help offset the cost of producing.
Shualee Cook has a wide range of work including full-length plays, musicals, plays with music, and opera. Shualee is the recipient of 2023 Nancy Dean Lesbian Playwriting Award, the 2021 Chesly/Bumbalo Award, The 2020 RAC Artist Fellowship, and the 2019 Parity Commission. She has been a resident playwright in the Confluence Regional Writers Project, Stage Left Theatre, and Tesseract Theatre, a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Her work has been developed by About Face Theatre, Breaking the Binary Festival, The New Coordinates, Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble, Mustard Seed Theatre, The Road Theatre, the Idle Muse Athena Festival, Campfire Theatre Festival, National Queer Theatre, and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, among others.
Roger Q. Mason is a writer who satirizes and revises history to disrupt the biases that separate rather than unite us. They have garnered five Barrymore Award nominations in Philadelphia, a Jeff Award Recommendation in Chicago, and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Datebook Pick. Mason’s Lavender Men, first produced by Playwrights’ Arena and Skylight Theatre Company, was lauded by the Los Angeles Times as “evoking the mingled visions of Suzan-Lori Parks, Jeremy O. Harris, and Michael R. Jackson.” They received 2024’s Playwrights’ Center McKnight National Playwright Commission, the inaugural Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Grant Award, a Hermitage Residency, a Lucille Lortel commission, a Kilroys List nod, and the Chuck Rowland Pioneer Award.
Ankita Raturi writes hyper-theatrical works in Hindi/Urdu, English, and Bahasa Indonesia about living between cultural identities and contending with the ongoing legacies of colonization. She grew up in capital cities, pediatric gastroenterology offices, and the bisexual closet. She’s had plays developed with Theater Mu, New York Theatre Workshop, Roundabout, Ma-Yi Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Playwrights Realm, Berkshire Theatre Group, Cygnet Theatre, Artists at Play, The COOP, Atlantic Pacific Theatre, Theater Masters, Fresh Ground Pepper, Hypokrit Theatre Company, New York Shakespeare Exchange, and Pete’s Candy Store. She is 2022 Ollie Award Winner.
Amy Tofte received a Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her play Righteous Among Us (2020 Todd McNerney Award) had a staged reading at Urban Stages (Off-Broadway) in 2023. She was recently a playwright with the Evolving Playwrights Group at Circle X Theatre in L.A., where she completed a new play, Rain Dog War, about the climate crisis. Amy is currently developing a new play, BloodSuckingLeech, at Nashville Repertory Theatre as part of their Ingram New Works Project. She has had residences at the Autry Museum of the American West, Brush Creek, Monson Arts, the Kennedy Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Yaddo, with work produced and developed throughout the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and twice at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
DALLAS: Undermain Theatre has announced Gracie Gardner as the 2024 recipient of the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work.
Gardner is an American playwright whose play Athena was recently produced at Undermain Theatre while her play Banya premiered at Theatrelab in New York City. Her play Pussy Sludge was selected for Theatertreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin and previously received the Relentless Award. It was developed by Less Than Rent at HERE Arts Center, and the Old Vic in London. Her play Athena (New York Times Critics’ Pick) was presented by the Hearth at JACK. Gracie is the recipient of the Theater of the Future Fellowship, McKnight National Residency and Commission, an Ensemble Studio Theater Sloan Foundation Commission, the James E. Michael Award, and the James Stevenson Prize, and she is a Samuel French OOB Festival winner. She’s a proud member of New Dramatists, Ars Nova Play Group, and Youngblood, and has received commissions from Clubbed Thumb, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She’s also worked as a video game writer for Annapurna Interactive.
For 40 years the Undermain Theatre has been bringing new work for the theatre to the Undermain stage in Dallas and beyond. In 2019, after the passing of Undermain’s founding artistic director Katherine Owens, producing artistic director Bruce DuBose, and the Undermain Theatre board of trustees established the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work. Its mission is to carry on Katherine’s lifelong commitment to thought-provoking, language driven new-work and provide a continuing influence in the American theatre scene by funding theatre artists in their pursuit of creating new-works for the American stage.
