| FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR THE 2025 SUSAN SMITH BLACKBURN PRIZE | |
| Posted by: Official_Press_Release 07:10 pm EST 02/04/25 | |
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| THE SUSAN SMITH BLACKBURN PRIZE PRESTIGIOUS INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR WOMEN+ PLAYWRIGHTS ANNOUNCES THE 2024-2025 FINALISTS New York/London (February 4, 2025) – The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize has announced this year's finalists for the prestigious international playwriting award, now in its 47th year and the largest and oldest award recognizing women+ writers for plays of outstanding quality written for the English-speaking theatre. The nine Finalists, chosen from over 200 plays, are: Chris Bush (UK-) Otherland Carys Coburn (Ireland) BÁN Keiko Green (US) You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World Haruna Lee (Taiwan-Japan-US) 49 Days Isobel McArthur (UK-Scotland) The Fair Maid of the West Suzie Miller (Australia-UK) Inter Alia a.k. payne (US) Furlough's Paradise Else Went (US) An Oxford Man Anna Ziegler (US) The Janeiad The 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize will announce the Winner at a celebration attended by writers, theatre artists, artistic leaders and supporters in New York City at Playwrights Horizons on March 10. The Winner will be awarded $25,000 and will also receive a signed and numbered print by renowned artist Willem de Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A Special Commendation of $10,000 may be given at the discretion of the judges, and each Finalist will receive $5,000. "We are thrilled to present the Prize at Playwrights Horizons, a theatre with a deep history and commitment to developing and producing brilliant new plays by women and non-binary writers," remarked Prize Executive Director, Leslie Swackhamer. 2023 Winner Sarah Mantell's In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot premiered there last Fall. This year's exciting cohort of playwrights hails from all over the English-speaking world, and represents a vigorous diversity of voices, genre and subject matter. We can't wait to celebrate and honor their work." Founded in 1978, the Prize is awarded annually to celebrate women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. Each year, over 400 theatres from North America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and the UK serve as Source Theatres for the Prize. Over 500 plays have been honored as Finalists of the Prize and many have gone on to receive other top honors, including Olivier, Lilly, Evening Standard and Tony Awards for Best Play. Eleven Susan Smith Blackburn Finalist playwrights have subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The Prize results in more productions of plays by women+ writers and fosters the interchange of plays between the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and other English-speaking countries. Past Winners of the Prize include Annie Baker, Alice Birch, Benedict Lombe, Julia Cho, Caryl Churchill, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Katori Hall, Lucy Kirkwood, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Dael Orlandersmith, Lucy Prebble, Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Cheryl West. Last year's Winner, 1536 by Ava Pickett, will premiere in London this May directed by Lindsey Turner at the Almeida Theatre. Judges for the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize are: Linda Cho (US) – Tony Award-winning costume designer; Jennifer Ehle(US) – Tony and BAFTA Award-winning actress; Nancy Medina (UK) – Artistic Director of the Bristol Old Vic; Mark Ravenhill (UK) – Acclaimed playwright; George Strus (US) – Founder, Breaking the Binary Theatre; and Indira Varma (UK) – Olivier Award-winning actress. ABOUT THE FINALIST PLAYS 49 Days by Haruna Lee, submitted by Playwrights Horizons (NYC) Wildly theatrical and haunting, 49 Days follows the Nishiyama family experiencing the stages of grief across generations. The 49th day meal after death signifies reincarnation in Buddhist ritual. This highly immersive and personal work moves fluidly through time and deftly employs music, multilingualism and magical elements to explore universal themes of love, identity, and trauma. The play has received readings at New Dramatists and Ma-Yi Theater Company, and a workshop at Playwrights Horizons, all directed by Aya Ogawa. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/49-days/ An Oxford Man by Else Went submitted by South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa) In this buoyant and witty play, Else Went takes us on the embellished (mostly true) life journey of Laurence Michael Dillon, the first "modern" transgender man. He was of a world undefined, by the world undefined—and ushered in a new age of understanding, through science. In this masterful, slightly sideways view of history Went makes us see themes of gender and identity in a fresh and surprising way. MTC's 2023 Ted Snowdon Reading Series presented a reading of the play. Southcoast Rep's 2024 Pacific Playwrights Festival also featured a reading of An Oxford Man. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/an-oxford-man/ BÁN by Carys Coburn, submitted by the Abbey Theatre (Dublin) Set in 1980's Ireland and loosely inspired by Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba, Bán is about sisters, lies, washing machines, love, and how much we're asked to give up in the name of family – up to and including family itself. Taking place in the family home of a controlling Bernie and her five daughters, secrets from the past can't remain hidden forever. The girls' passion and lust for life result in Bernie's grip weakening and the lies unravelling. As the girls search for the truth and freedom, this rich stew of a family drama roils with questions of heritage, motherhood, ethnicity and gender. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/ban/ Furlough's Paradise by a.k. payne, submitted by the Alliance Theatre (Atlanta) In this heart-wrenching yet tender play, a.k. payne unpacks the intimacies of the relationship between 2 cousins, Sade and Mina, raised like sisters but now living wildly different lives. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina takes a brief reprieve from her successful life on the West Coast, they try to make sense of grief, home, love and kinship. Traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull the cousins apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer's arrival. Furlough's Paradise premiered at the Alliance Theatre in 2024 and will receive its West Coast Premiere in April at the Geffen Playhouse. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/furloughs-paradise/ Inter Alia by Suzie Miller, submitted by the National Theatre (London) From the author of the Olivier-winning Prima Facie, comes this taut drama about an eminent London Judge juggling a high-profile career with modern life and her various roles as mother, wife/partner, friend and feminist. When her son is accused of rape, her world is turned upside down and she is forced to live out her worst nightmare, questioning how far she will go to protect her son and how well she ever really knew him. Rage, guilt, tenderness and despair vie for space in her fight to survive. Inter Alia will premiere at the National Theatre this July starring Rosamund Pike. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/inter-alia/ Otherland by Chris Bush submitted by the Almeida Theatre (London) From the book-writer of the Olivier- winning Standing at the Sky's Edge, comes this strikingly resonant play about the necessity, beauty and terror of change. The play follows the delicate uncoupling of Jo and Harry, as new worlds start to open up for them both– worlds filled with new partners, new identities, andvnew possibilities. Otherland is a universal, lyrical, deeply funny and at times utterly surreal exploration of the joys, fears and challenges of what it means to be a woman finding oneself. Otherland is currently in rehearsals for its premiere production at the Almeida Theatre, London – playing February 12 – March 15. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/otherland/ The Fair Maid of the West by Isobel McArthur, submitted by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-Upon-Avon) A bold, bombastic and skillful comedy filled with music and swash-buckling adventure, Fair Maid radically recenters and modernizes Thomas Heywood's Elizabethan romp. McArthur illuminates the original text for the modern day but also to revels in the joy and challenges of retaining the original's pentameter. About the life-saving powers of community, compromise and compassion, Fair Maid of the West premiered to rapturous reviews in a production directed by the playwright at The Swan Theatre for The Royal Shakespeare Company in November 2024. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/fair-maid-of-the-west/ The Janeiad by Anna Ziegler, submitted by the Alley Theatre (Houston) In The Odyssey, Penelope's long wait is eventually rewarded when Odysseus returns twenty years after leaving to fight the Trojan War. Will the same be true for Jane in Brooklyn, twenty years after her husband left for work one fateful September morning? A play about longing and hope as well as the myths we tell ourselves in order to get through the day, The Janeiad is a wry contemplation of the power, and slipperiness, of storytelling. The Janeiad was workshopped at the Cape Cod Theatre Project and The Ojai Playwrights Conference. It was produced in the fall of 2024 at the Alley Theatre in a co-world premiere with the Old Globe Theatre, whose production is upcoming. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/the-janeaid/ You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World by Keiko Green submitted by UC San Diego MFA Playwriting Program (San Diego) In this genre-defying comedy about family, death, grief, and ultimately life, Keiko Green casts a spell of deep theatrical magic. Dream sequences, revolving around a terminal diagnosis, the search for meaning amidst chaos, and extinct animals floating in the cosmos create a rich and celebratory spectacle as magical and strange as the world itself. Commissioned by ACT Theatre, the play has received workshops at South Coast Repertory Theatre's Pacific Playwrights Festival, Amphibian Stage's Spark Fest, the O'Neill National Playwrights Center's National Playwrights Conference, Boston Court Theatre's New Play Reading Festival, Ashland New Plays Festival and Second Stage's Judith Champion New Voices Reading Series. It will premiere this April at South Coast Repertory Theatre. https://www.blackburnprize.org/year/2025_/you-are-cordially-invited-to-the-end-of-the-world/ ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS CHRIS BUSH (she/her) has twice been named by The Stage as one of the 100 most influential people in British theatre. Plays include Standing at the Sky's Edge (Sheffield Theatres/ National Theatre/ West End, Olivier Award for Best New Musical); The Odyssey; A Declaration from the People; Pericles (National Theatre); A Doll's House; Rock/Paper/Scissors; The Band Plays On; Steel; What We Wished For; A Dream; The Sheffield Mysteries (Sheffield Theatres); The Doncastrian Chalk Circle(Cast/ National Theatre); Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The World (UK tour, UK Theatre Award); (Kein) Weltuntergang/(Not) the End of the World (Schaubühne, Berlin); Nine Lessons and Carols: Stories for a Long Winter (Almeida Theatre); Faustus: That Damned Woman (Headlong/ Lyric Hammersmith/ Birmingham Rep); The Assassination of Katie Hopkins(Theatr Clwyd, UK Theatre Award). Other awards include a South Bank Sky Arts Award, the Hermitage Major Theater Award, the Perfect Pitch Award, a Brit Writers' Award and the Theatre Royal Haymarket Writers' Award. https://www.berlinassociates.com/client-list/chris-bush Carys Coburn (they/she) won the Verity Bargate Award 2017 for Citysong - co-produced by Soho Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, and Galway International Arts Festival. Other plays include Absent The Wrong (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2022) and HOTHOUSE (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2023). One of the founders of MALAPROP, their work together won acclaim for its distinctive blend of nerdiness and tenderness.Work with young people is a major strand of their practice, and their interdisciplinary practice spans opera libretti (Elsewhere, Horse Ape Bird) and queer cabaret extravaganzas (THISISPOPBABY's WAKE). https://www.caryscoburnwriter.com Keiko Green (she/her) is a playwright, screenwriter and performer based out of Los Angeles and Seattle. Productions include Empty Ride (The Old Globe), Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play (Old Globe; San Francisco Playhouse), Hells Canyon (Theater Mu), Sharon (Cygnet Theatre), Gorgeous (Rivendell/Raven Theatre), Hometown Boy (Actors Express; Seattle Public Theater), and Nadeshiko (Sound Theatre Company). Her plays have been developed by the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Old Globe, the Kennedy Center, the National New Play Network, Playwrights Realm, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Atlantic Theater Company. Awards/Honors: Kilroys Web, San Diego Critics Circle Award (Outstanding New Play), Gregory Award (Outstanding New Play). MFA: UCSD Playwriting. https://www.keikogreen.com/about Haruna Lee (they/them) is a non-binary Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, screenwriter, educator and community steward whose work is rooted in liberation and healing. Plays include War Lesbian (Dixon Place 2014), Memory Retrograde (Ars Nova 2017, UTR 2018), plural (love) (WP Pipeline Festival 2022, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 2019), and Suicide Forest (Ma-Yi Theater & Bushwick Starr 2019, Off Broadway remount 2020), for which they received an Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception. Lee has received the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Ollie New Play Award, FCA Grants to Artists Award, a Hermitage Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, the Map Fund Grant, the Van Lier Fellowship, and is a current member of New Dramatists (2023-2030). https://www.harunalee.com/ Isobel McArthur (she/her) is a Glasgow-based actor, director and playwright. Her Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) won the Best Comedy Olivier Award in 2022. As playwright-director, other recent productions include her touring adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped (National Theatre of Scotland), her Fringe First Winner The Grand Old Opera House Hotel (Traverse Theatre) as well as her nominated piece for the prize, an adaptation of Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West. Isobel has won the Evening Standard Award for Best Emerging Talent, The Scotsman's Fringe First Award, The List ‘Hot 100' Award, The Saltire Society's 40 Under 40 alongside nominations for The Stage's ‘Best West End Debut', and both Whatsonstage's ‘Best Supporting Actor' and ‘Best New Play'. https://www.casarotto.co.uk/clients/isobel-mc-arthur Suzie Miller (she/her) is an Australian/British international playwright and screenwriter with degrees in law and science. Miller has written over 40 plays. Her plays have been produced in over a hundred productions around the world and won multiple prestigious awards. Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer in the West End and Broadway productions was nominated for 5 Olivier Awards 2023 winning for Best New Play and Best Actress; and nominated for 4 Tony Awards 2023 winning for Best Actress. It has been translated into over 30 languages, produced all over the world and also published as a novel in 6 countries. https://theagency.co.uk/the-clients/suzie-miller/ a.k. payne (they/she) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and a 3x finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.Their work has been developed with the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab." She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre's I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Foundation). MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. https://www.akpayne.com Else Went (she/her) is a New York based writer whose plays have been developed and presented with The Public Theater, South Coast Reperatory, Ars Nova, Breaking the Binary, Mercury Store, WP, Playwrights Realm, NYTW, and Trans Lab, among others. Else is the current Tow Foundation Resident Playwright at the Public Theater. She has received residencies from MacDowell, Stillwright, and Barn Arts, and is co-founder of The Renovationists, an artistic collective dedicated to queering the canon through new work and adaptation. https://newplayexchange.org/users/3363/else-went Anna Ziegler (she/her) Plays include the widely produced Photograph 51 (West End, directed by Michael Grandage and starring Nicole Kidman; named the number one play by the Chicago Tribune; winner of London's WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play; The Last Match (Roundabout; Old Globe; Writers Theatre), The Wanderers (Old Globe; Roundabout; City Theatre; Gesher Theater (Israel); Ernst Deutsch Theater (Germany); Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play), A Delicate Ship (NY Times Critic's Pick), Actually (Geffen Playhouse; Williamstown; Manhattan Theatre Club; Trafalgar Studios in London and many more; L.A. Ovation Award winner for Playwriting for an Original Play; TimeOut NY Critic's Pick). Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama has published two collections of her work entitled Anna Ziegler: Plays One and Anna Ziegler: Plays Two. https://annabziegler.net |
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