NEW YORK CITY: The Lark and the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation have announced the playwrights selected for the inaugural Venturous Playwrights Fellowship. The chosen fellows will be in residence for two years at the Lark, where they will have the space and resources to develop a new play. Each of the fellows will receive an award of $50,000 over the two-year fellowship, in addition to a production subsidy grant of up to $50,000 to support a production of their play at a theatre of their choosing.
“We are elated by this opportunity to so deeply support the work of three outstanding writers,” said Andrea Hiebler, director of scouting and submissions at the Lark, in a statement. “Each play is an idiosyncratic example of the fearless exploration of the range of human experience that the stage deserves.”
The recipients are Olivia Dufault, Mike Lew, and Susan Soon He Stanton. Dufault will develop For Want of a Horse, a romance between a human and a horse. Lew will develop Teenage Dick, a reimagining of Richard III that follows a junior in high school with cerebral palsy who will do anything to fit in. Stanton will work on Today Is My Birthday, about a writer whose creativity is unfurled after she moves out of New York City, so she creates an alter-ego for a radio bit.
The fellows were selected through a curation process by the staff of the Lark and the Venturous Theater Fund, based on choosing work that qualified as “venturous.” Plays considered were challenging in form, controversial in subject matter, ambitious in scale, and/or experimental in concept.