Manhattan Theatre Club (Lynne Meadow, Artistic Director; Barry Grove, Executive Producer; Daniel Sullivan, Acting Artistic Director 2007-2008) has announced the 2008 recipients of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Initiative commissions. This year's five commissioned writers are Rinne Groff (Saved), Beau Willimon (Farragut North), Mark Schultz (A Brief History of Helen of Troy), Lucy Kirkwood (Tinderbox) and Hannah Moscovitch (East of Berlin).
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has provided a grant to Manhattan Theatre Club to support the development of plays that address themes of math, science and technology or plays that depict scientists, mathematicians and engineers as major characters in order to bridge the divide between the arts and sciences.
MTC's new Director of Artistic Development
Jerry Patch now oversees the program. "The Sloan Foundation continues to be a primary supporter of serious new work," Patch said. "Their leadership and commissioning support for playwrights is vital to our theatres."
"We are delighted to continue our fruitful collaboration with MTC, one of the nation's finest theater companies," said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director. "This bumper crop of exciting new work shows that science and technology remains fertile ground for the theatrical imagination and that innovative playwrights will seek to delve into the mysterious heart, and the hard drive, of modern life to give us undreamt-of visions and experiences."
"MTC's eight year partnership with the Sloan Foundation has supported and expanded our mission of developing new work," said Annie MacRae, MTC's Play Development Associate and Sloan Project Manager. "We remain grateful for the Foundation's support."
MTC first collaborated with the Sloan Foundation in 2000 with the production of
David Auburn's Tony Awardâ and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Proof. MTC's partnership with the Sloan Foundation has expanded to include multiple annual commissions for emerging, mid-level and established writers as well as a production grant to stage Sloan-related works. In addition to Proof, Sloan supported MTC's production of
Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy in 2003.
Since partnering with the Sloan Foundation, MTC has commissioned a total of 22 writers including
Craig Lucas,
Shelagh Stephenson,
Ron Hutchinson,
Rona Munro,
Itamar Moses,
Bryony Lavery,
Stephen Belber,
Eric Simonson, Dava Sobel,
Liz Meriwether,
Peter Morris, Kenneth Lin and Brett Neveu.
Rinne Groff's plays have been produced by
The Public Theater,
Playwrights Horizons,
Trinity Repertory Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the
Women's Project, PS 122 and Clubbed Thumb. Her awards include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Award, an OBIE Award and a NYSCA Individual Artist grant. She has participated in residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the
Sundance Theatre Lab, the Australian National Playwrights Conference and the Orchard Project. Groff has been commissioned by
Trinity Repertory Company, the Guthrie Theater,
Playwrights Horizons and PS 122. She is a founding member of
Elevator Repair Service and has been a part of the writing, staging and performing of their shows, both in the States and on European tour, since the company's inception in 1991. Groff was a staff writer on the second season of the Showtime series Weeds starring
Mary-Louise Parker. Other affiliations include
New Dramatists, the
Dramatists Guild, New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, Clubbed Thumb, Target Margin and NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she teaches in the Department of Dramatic Writing. Groff holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from New York University.
Beau Willimon's Farragut North will have its world premiere this fall at the
Atlantic Theater Company, and his feature adaptation of the play is set up at
Warner Brothers, with Smoke House and Appian Way producing. His play Lower Ninth recently ran at The
Flea Theater. Willimon is also writing A
Tale of Two Cities for
Warner Brothers and
Leonardo DiCaprio and The Jury for Fox 2000. He is a recipient of the Lila Acheson Wallace Juilliard Playwriting Fellowship and the Lincoln Center Le Compte du Nuoy Award. Willimon holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University.
Mark Schultz's recent plays include Everything Will Be Different or A Brief History of Helen of Troy (
Soho Rep/
True Love Productions) for which he won the 2005 Oppenheimer Award and the 2006 Kesselring Prize; The Gingerbread House which will be produced at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre next spring; Polar Bear (Birmingham Rep, UK) and Gift (Rising Phoenix Rep / NY Fringe Festival). Everything Will Be Different was produced by the Actors Touring Company with
Theatre Royal Plymouth under the title A Brief History of Helen of Troy at the Soho Theatre in London after a UK tour. Other plays include The Gingerbread House; Magic Kingdom and Brightness. His latest play, Deathbed, premiered in New York in January 2008, and his play Passion was featured in
Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope magazine. He is a founding member and artistic associate of Theater Mitu, a member of Rising Phoenix Rep, and co-coordinator of
MCC Theater's Playwrights' Coalition. Schultz holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University.
Lucy Kirkwood was born in Leytonstone, England, attended the University of Edinburgh, and now lives in London. Her first full professional production, Tinderbox, was directed by
Josie Rourke at London's
Bush Theatre. Her adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler will be directed by Carrie Cracknell at Notting Hill's
Gate Theatre in September 2008. She won the PMA award in 2006 and has had work performed at the Arcola Theatre, Hackney, The Union Theatre, Southwark, the Latitude festival in Suffolk and by New York's Mind the Gap Theatre Company. She is a writer on the Channel 4 program Skins and is currently resident writer at Clean Break Theatre Company.
HANNAH MOSCOVITCH's plays include her short works Essay, The Russian Play, USSR and Mexico City, and her full-length East of Berlin. Moscovitch's plays have been produced at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, where she is currently playwright-in-residence, the Factory Theatre, the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, Harbourfront Centre, the SummerWorks Theatre Festival and the Lab Cab Festival. Moscovitch's episode of the hit radio series Afghanada aired on CBC in the fall of 2007. Her play USSR has recently been made into a short film for Bravo Television Network. This season, Tarragon Theatre will remount their acclaimed production of East of Berlin which will then tour to the Firehall Theatre in Vancouver. Moscovitch has been commissioned by a number of Canada's most exciting established and experimental theatre companies. She is a graduate of
The National Theatre School of Canada and the University of Toronto.
ABOUT MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB
Under the leadership of Artistic Director
Lynne Meadow and Executive Producer
Barry Grove, MTC has become one of the country's most prominent and prestigious theatre companies. MTC productions have earned a total of 16 Tony Awards and five Pulitzer Prizes, an accomplishment unparalleled by a New York theatrical institution. Renowned MTC productions include Top Girls; From Up Here; Come Back, Little Sheba; The Receptionist; LoveMusik; Blackbird; Translations; Shining City; Rabbit Hole; Doubt; Proof; The Tale of the Allergist's Wife; Kimberly Akimbo; Love! Valour! Compassion!; Sylvia; Four Dogs and a Bone; Putting It Together; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; Crimes of the Heart; and Ain't Misbehavin'.
In 2003, MTC reopened Broadway's landmark, long-neglected Biltmore Theatre, soon to be renamed the
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, following a two-year, $35 million capital campaign. In addition, MTC operates two theatres at New York
City Center (131 West 55th Street), its Off-Broadway home since 1984.
During Meadow's sabbatical this season,
Daniel Sullivan, a close associate of MTC and director of several Manhattan Theatre Club productions (Rabbit Hole,
Brooklyn Boy, Sight Unseen, Proof, Psychopathia Sexualis), has been serving as Acting Artistic Director. Meadow will resume her full duties as artistic director in September and is consulting on the planning of the 2008-2009 season.
ABOUT THE ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION INITIATIVE
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also partners with the Magic Theatre, the
Ensemble Studio Theatre and
Playwrights Horizons. Sloan provides the
Ensemble Studio Theatre with a grant to support new play commissions, readings, workshops and productions as well as regional
Theater Productions of plays that EST has commissioned and/or produced. The Foundation also supports LA Theaterworks with a grant to broadcast full-length plays commissioned by partner theaters on National Public Radio as part of a monthly science series.
In addition to its theatrical partnerships, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology Initiative supports the use of books, radio, public television, commercial television and film, the internet and new media to reach a wide non-specialist audience. The Foundation has recently supported the following projects and institutions: New York public radio WNYC's increased science coverage on Studio 360; National Geographic's broadcast of Guns, Germs and Steel, based on Jared Diamond's prizewinning bestseller and a television version of
Michael Frayn's Tonyâ-winning Copenhagen. The Foundation regularly awards prizes at six leading film schools—American Film Institute; UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television;
Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama; Columbia University Film Department; NYU Tisch School of the Arts and USC School of Cinema and Television. Sloan also supports the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Film Institute. Through these festivals, Sloan has given awards to
Bill Condon's Kinsey,
Ronald Harwood's Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
Tom Stoppard's Enigma and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.
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