Playwright Jen Silverman will receive the 2013 Yale Drama Series award for her new play Still this evening, September 12 at Lincoln Center Theater's Claire Tow Theater (150 West 65 Street). The evening will include the presentation to the playwright of the David Charles Horn Prize, a cash award of $10,000, and a staged reading of Still, directed by Kate Whoriskey, featuring Jeanine Seralles, Chris Grant, Birgit Huppuch and Elvy Yorst.
In addition, as winner of the competition, Still¸ will be published by the Yale University Press.
Still, a play about a mother grieving her stillborn child, was chosen from over 1100 entries submitted to the competition from 30 countries. Pultizer Prize winning playwright
Marsha Norman served as the sole judge for this annual competition. 2013 runners-up are
Adam Szymkowicz for Mercy (runner-up #1), Jennifer Blackmer for The Human Terrain (runner-up #2) and Catherine Treischmann for The Most Deserving (runner-up #3).
Now in its seventh year, The Yale Drama Series, funded by the David
Charles Horn Foundation, is an annual international open submission competition for emerging playwrights who are invited to submit original, unpublished, full-length, English language plays for consideration. 2013 marks the first year of
Marsha Norman's two-year tenure as judge, following in the footsteps of fellow playwrights
Edward Albee,
David Hare and
John Guare. For complete contest rules, visit
www.yalepress.yale.edu/ypubooks/drama.asp.
In Still Morgan's baby was born dead, Dolores is pregnant with a child she doesn't want, and failed midwife Elena seeks either redemption or a career change. As all three women confront their fears, their desires, and each other, dead baby Constantinople roams the world, searching for the meaning of the word "wow," a satisfying explanation of S&M, and above all, his mother.
Marsha Norman commented: "
Jen Silverman wrote a play that, in both style and content, shook us to our bones. The other entries (over 1,000 of them) were, by and large, bold and deeply felt. The ones I chose to honor as finalists are the ones whose craft and language distinguished them from the rest. They were also the ones that touched me deeply, that made me feel something that lasted beyond the reading of them."
Jen Silverman is a New York-based playwright whose work has been produced Off-Broadway with The
Playwrights Realm at the
Cherry Lane Theatre (Crane Story), at Cleveland Public Theatre (Akarui), and by the Gallatin School/NYU (Bones at the Gate). Her play Phoebe in Winter premiered with Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks earlier this year. She is a member of Youngblood at EST, Uncharted at
Ars Nova, Groundbreakers at terraNova, and is an affiliated artist with New Georges and The Lark. Ms. Silverman is a two-time MacDowell fellow, and has developed work with Clubbed Thumb,
Playwrights Horizons, InterAct Theatre, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, NY Stage and Film/ Powerhouse, and Seven Devils among others. In 2011 she was a United States delegate for a China/America Writers Exchange in Beijing. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She was raised in Japan, Europe, and Finland as well as in the United States. As an adult she has continued her nomadic lifestyle, living and travelling in Asia, North Africa, and South America in between concentrated stints of American living. She is currently working on her first book of poetry. Still is also the winner of the 2012
Jane Chambers Award.
Marsha Norman won the Pulitzer Prize for her play 'night, Mother, a Tony Award for the book of The Secret Garden, and numerous other prizes and awards for her other work off and on Broadway, including the musicals The Color Purple and The Trumpet of the Swan. For the last twenty years, she has been Co-Director, with
Christopher Durang, of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School. She is a former Vice President of the
Dramatists Guild of America and a founder of The Lilly Awards. This season, she has a musical of The Bridges of Madison County, with music and lyrics by
Jason Robert Brown, and a play commissioned by the UN Commission on Trafficking and Violence Toward Women.
Kate Whoriskey directed the world premieres of
Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel and Fabulation, or the Reeducation of Undine and the Chicago and New York productions of Ms. Nottage's Ruined. Her extensive New York and regional theater credits include productions at the
Vineyard Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club,
Playwrights Horizons,
LAByrinth Theater Company,
Ensemble Studio Theatre,
Second Stage Theatre, South Coast Rep,
Goodman Theatre, ART, the
Huntington Theatre Company, and Seattle's
Intiman Theatre, where she served as Artistic Director.
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