NEW YORK CITY: The Legacy Playwrights Initiative has named Carlyle Brown and Milcha Sanchez-Scott the recipients of the 2022 Legacy Playwright Awards. The initiative shines a light on the achievements and influence of playwrights whose work has fallen out of the public eye, offering a pathway for rediscovery and financial support for the exigencies of late life.
“I am deeply gratified and honored to receive a Legacy Playwright Initiative Award,” Brown, who was honored at a gala last fall alongside Sanchez-Scott, said in a statement. “To be encouraged in your twilight, in your third act, and supported just when one may be on the cusp of a creative expansion, are the rarest of gifts. As a young man I marveled that Goethe wrote Faust when he was 80. Now, it
doesn’t seem so far-fetched.”
Brown is a playwright, performer, curator, and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company in Minneapolis. An alumnus of New Dramatists and a Lifetime Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, Brown’s works have been produced at theatres across the country and around the world. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other accolades, and has been an artist in residence and visiting professor at several universities. Brown has also worked as a museum exhibit writer and story consultant, and is the curator of the Cultural Diaspora Playwrights Residency at the Camargo Foundation, where he is a trustee, and the Afro-Atlantic Playwrights’ Festival at the Playwrights’ Center. Brown is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Playwright in Residence at Illusion Theater.
“I am humbled, honored, grateful, and so happy to receive the Legacy Playwright Award,” Sanchez-Scott said in a statement. “This honor will help me work on my first musical and continue work on a play about an elderly living facility and the characters within.”
Sanchez-Scott, who born in Bali and grew up in San Diego, is a graduate of the University of San Diego. She has had six plays produced and is currently working on the mariachi musical Leti’s Wedding. Sanchez-Scott is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s First Level Award for American playwrights, the Vesta Award, and the Lecompte du Nouy Foundation Award. She is a former member of INTAR Theatre’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory, directed by María Irene Fornés.
The Legacy Playwrights Initiative grants two monetary awards, advocates for professional productions of legacy playwrights’s works, reissues previously published plays, and films interviews to highlight legacy playwrights’s careers. It is supported by the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.
