Anne Cattaneo Wins 2011 Margo Jones Award

The Ohio State University Arts and Humanities and University Libraries' Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute has announced that it will present the prestigious 2011 Margo Jones Award to Lincoln Center Theater dramaturg Anne Cattaneo. The award, which will be presented to Ms. Cattaneo in a ceremony in the Vivian Beaumont Theater lobby on Monday, July 11 beginning at 5:30, is given annually to a "citizen-of-the-theatre who has demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, with a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the Living Theatre everywhere."

The award will be presented to Ms. Cattaneo, the first dramaturg to receive this honor, by Ohio State University Arts and Humanties Dean Mark Shanda, joined by Ms. Cattaneo's colleagues LCT Artistic Director Andre Bishop, playwright John Guare and actress Meryl Streep. Also participating in the ceremony will be Deborah Robison, niece of Jerome Lawrence, who founded the award 50 years ago with playwriting partner Robert E. Lee, and Nena Couch of Ohio State University.

Past recipients include such theatre luminaries as Andre Bishop, Adrian Hall, Ellen Stewart, Zelda Fichandler, Jules Irving, Lloyd Richards, Gregory Mosher, Robert Whitehead, Jane Alexander, Joseph Papp, Lucille Lortel, Mel Gussow and James Houghton.

Anne Cattaneo is the dramaturg of Lincoln Center Theater and the creator and head of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors' Lab. A three term past president of Literary Mangers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, she is the recipient of LMDA's first Lessing Award for lifetime achievement of dramaturgy. She has worked widely as a dramaturg on classical plays with directors such as Bartlett Sher, Robert Wilson, Adrian Hall, Jack O'Brien, Robert Falls, Mark Lamos and JoAnne Akalaitis. As the director of the Playworks Program at the Phoenix Theater during the late 1970's, she commissioned and developed plays by Wendy Wasserstein (ISN'T IT ROMANTIC) Mustapha Matura (MEETINGS) and Christopher Durang (BEYOND THERAPY). For The Acting Company, she created two projects: ORCHARDS (published by Knopf and Broadway Play Publishing) which presented seven Chekhov stories adapted for the stage by Maria Irene Fornes, Spalding Gray, John Guare, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Michael Weller and Samm-Art Williams, and LOVE'S FIRE (published by William Morrow) responses to Shakespeare sonnets by Eric Bogosian, William Finn, John Guare, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange and Wendy Wasserstein. Her own translations of 20th Century German playwrights include Brecht's GALILEO (Goodman Theater 1986 starring Brian Dennehy) and Botho Strauss' BIG AND LITTLE (Phoenix production starring Barbara Barrie, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) She is currently on the faculty at Juilliard.
The Margo Jones Award celebrates Margo Jones' work in the theatre - her pioneering efforts in the development of professional regional theatre, her tireless championing of new plays, and her nurturing of new playwrights. Through the professional theatre that she founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1947, Jones produced new work such as William Inge's Farther Off from Heaven, Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke, and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind, which later opened at The National Theatre in New York. Although her professional accomplishments were cut short by her untimely death in 1955, the pattern Jones created for developing theatre works became a standard for producing new plays.

The Margo Jones Award was established in 1961 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, and has been administered by the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University since 1993. Additional support for the award is made possible by a bequest from Jones' colleague J. B. (Tad) Adoue III.

The Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute serves as an archive for performers, playwrights, choreographers, designers, producing organizations, and theatre and dance companies, among others, and advances the study and inspiration of the performing arts. In association with the Department of Theatre, the Institute acquires, preserves, and makes accessible materials documenting the performing arts for the purposes of scholarship, education, and enjoyment; provides an active teaching component; serves as a source for new works creation, development, and reconstruction; and enriches patrons' experiences of these materials which reveal our performing arts culture and history.