Photos: Naomi Iizuka's CASA DE MAÑANA Receives Workshop Presentation at Goodman Theatre

The Hermitage Artist Retreat has released photos from the workshop presentation of the newly commissioned play by Naomi Iizuka, the fifth recipient of the $35,000 Hermitage Major Theater Award (HMTA). On Friday, October 23, the Hermitage presented a Chicago workshop of Iizuka’s newly commissioned play Casa de Mañana, in collaboration with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

The Hermitage Major Theater Award was established in 2021 to recognize a playwright or theater artist with a substantial commission to create a new, original, and impactful piece of theater. This international, jury-selected award, established by the Hermitage with generous support from Flora Major and the Kutya Major Foundation, offers one of the largest unrestricted nonprofit theater commissions. Iizuka received a cash prize of $35,000, as well as a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat (Manasota Key, Florida), plus a developmental workshop and reading in Chicago. The prize is intended to bridge the connection between the Hermitage, where the commission is born, and other leading arts and culture centers around the world, including New York, Chicago, and London, where great theater is frequently developed and presented.

Naomi Iizuka’s Casa de Mañana is a dark comedy that explores what it means to make art when your life and the world around you are imploding. This Chicago workshop reading was directed by Lisa Portes. The cast featured stage and screen actors Vaneh Assadourian (Hermitage Fellow Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here, Forget Me Not); Ayanna Bria Bakari (The Chi, Empire); Kate Buddeke (Superior Donuts, Death of a Salesman); Mi Kang (The Chinese Lady, Villette); Polly Noonan (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dead Man’s Cell Phone); Adam Poss (Patriots, Chicago Med); and Barbara Robertson (Wicked, Angels in America).

HMTA winners are nominated and selected by a committee of recognized arts leaders in the field of theater. The 2024-2025 Award Committee that selected Naomi Iizuka included Susan V. Booth, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre; Glenn Davis, an accomplished actor, producer, and Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company; and Chay Yew, an Obie Award-winning director and playwright who served as longtime Artistic Director of Victory Gardens Theater.

Past recipients of the Hermitage Major Theater Award include Madeleine George (2021), who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, and served as a writer and producer for Hulu’s hit series Only Murders in the Building. George presented the first full-length reading of her new play The Sore Loser at New York’s MCC Theater in 2023. Theater-maker and director Shariffa Ali was selected as the second recipient of the Hermitage Major Theater Award. Ali shared an in-process presentation of her newly devised work Hero for an invitation-only audience in late 2023, also at MCC Theater. Imani Uzuri, the third HMTA recipient, is a composer, vocalist, librettist, improviser, and lyricist. The Hermitage collaborated with New York Theatre Workshop in 2024 to present this concert reading of Uzuri’s new musical Lighthouse of the Singing Birds. UK-based playwright and librettist, Chris Bush, the fourth recipient of the Hermitage Major Theater Award presented her original play Orlando (FL) at London’s National Theatre in the fall of 2025, directed by Hermitage Artistic Director and CEO Andy Sandberg. Playwright Anne Washburn was announced last season as the sixth recipient of the Hermitage Major Theater Award; the Hermitage will present a workshop reading of her original commission in New York in the fall of 2027. The seventh recipient of the HMTA will be announced in the coming weeks.

Photo Credit: Hugo Hentoff