NEW YORK CITY: The Laurents/Hatcher Foundation has announced Sugar in Our Wounds by Donja R. Love as the winner of the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award. Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) will receive $100,000 to support the world premiere production of the play this June. Love will also receive a $50,000 cash prize.
“I am thrilled that Donja’s beautiful play has been recognized with this esteemed award,” said MTC’s artistic director, Lynne Meadow, in a statement. “Donja R. Love is a gifted writer and I am proud to be introducing him to MTC audiences later this season with this important play which humanizes a part of history rarely seen onstage. All of us at MTC are grateful to David Saint and everyone at the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation for their generous production support.”
Sugar in Our Wounds follows a young slave during the Civil War whose dreams of freedom are intensified when he unexpectedly falls in love with another man, who joins his makeshift family living on a plantation. Saheem Ali will direct.
Love is an Afro-queer playwright, poet, and filmmaker. His other plays include Fireflies, in the Middle, and Soft; Or the Dead N—- Poem, and his works have been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, Rising Circle Theatre Collective, the Lark, and the Playwrights Realm. Love served as the Lark’s 2016 Van Lier New Voices Playwriting Fellow and the Playwrights Realm’s 2016-17 Writing Fellow. Love is the co-founder of the Each-Other Project, an arts advocacy program that helps build community and provide visibility for LGBTQ people of color. He was the recipient of the 2016 Arch and Bruce Brown Playwriting Award, and a finalist for the Eugene O’ Neill 2017 National Playwrights Conference. He was also named the 2011 Philadelphia Adult Grand Slam Poetry Champion. His film work includes the web series Modern Day Black Gay and the short film Once a Star.
He recently detailed his harrowing experiences trying to deposit the Laurents/Hatcher prize money at a bank on the Lark’s blog.
