NEW YORK CITY: The American Playwriting Foundation has named Max Yu the recipient of the 2019 Relentless Award for his play Nightwatch. Established in honor of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, the award recognizes a theatrical work that has not yet been produced. The award includes a $45,000 prize, and staged readings of the play will be presented across the country.
Nightwatch follows a Chinese American boy who explores his role in the Chinese Cultural Revolution after his father dies. The play was blindly selected by a committee of playwrights that included David Bar Katz, Eric Bogosian, Thomas Bradshaw, Laura Marks, Lynn Nottage, and Lucy Thurber.
The finalists for the prize, who each won $1,500, are Mia Chung for This Exquisite Corpse and John J. Caswell Jr. for Wet Brain. The semi-finalists include Free & Proud by Charles Gershman, Incendiary by Dave Harris, The Leopard Play, or sad songs for lost boys by Isaac Gómez, Pound by Sam Silbiger, Society by Skylar Fox and Simon Henriques, and Where the Lovelight Gleams by Kyle J McCloskey. Previous winners of the Relentless have included Aleshea Harris for Is God Is, Clare Barron for Dance Nation, and Sarah deLappe for The Wolves.
