Stephen Adly Guirgis, Lynn Nottage, Dave Malloy and Dominique Morisseau Are Signature Theatre's New Resident Playwrights

Four award-winning playwrights will join the residency programs at Signature Theatre, the company announced today.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy) will join Signature as the Residency One Playwright in the 2017-18 Season. Residency One, Signature's core one-year Playwright-in-Residence program, is an intensive exploration of a single writer's body of work. Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined) will follow Guirgis as the Residency One Playwright during the 2018-19 Season.

In addition, Obie Award-winner Dave Malloy (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) and Kennedy Prize for Drama Award-winner Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew) will join Signature's Residency Five program, which guarantees playwrights three premieres over five years. Malloy, who will be the first musical theatre writer to have a residency at Signature, and Morisseau will join current Residency Five playwrights Annie Baker, Martha Clarke, Will Eno, Katori Hall, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan and ReGina Taylor.

"Signature has worked with tremendous playwrights over the past 26 seasons. I am delighted, in my first season as Artistic Director, to welcome these four writers to the company and look forward to giving them an artistic home," said Artistic Director Paige Evans. "Stephen, Lynn, Dave and Dominique are gifted, dynamic writers whose work explores the human condition in insightful and distinctive ways. I cannot wait to celebrate them and share their work with Signature's vibrant and diverse community."

Titles, dates and creative teams will be announced at a later date.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:

Stephen Adly Guirgis is a member and former co-artistic director of LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays have been produced on five continents and throughout the United States. His most recent play, Between Riverside and Crazy (dir: Austin Pendleton) premiered at Atlantic Theater Company, moved to Second Stage Theatre, and garnered numerous awards including the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other plays include: The Motherf***er with the Hat (6 Tony nominations, including Best Play, dir: Anna D Shapiro), Den of Thieves (directed by Max Daniels), Dominica The Fat Ugly Ho (dir: Adam Rapp), as well as Our Lady of 121st Street, Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, In Arabia We'd All Be Kings, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Public Theater) and The Little Flower of East Orange (Public Theater) - all five directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and world premiered at LAByrinth Theater Company. In London, his plays have premiered at The Donmar Warehouse, The Almeida (dir: Rupert Goold), The Hampstead (Robert Delamere), and at The Arts Theater in the West End (Dir: Philip Seymour Hoffman). As an actor, he has appeared in theatre, film and television, including roles in Alejandro Inarritu's Oscar-winning Birdman, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, Todd Solondz's Palindromes, and Brett C. Leonard's Jailbait opposite Michael Pitt. He co-created and executive produced Netflix's "The Get Down" with Baz Luhrmann. Other awards include: the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, The Harold & Mimi Steinberg Award, PEN/Laura Pels Award, Whiting Award, TCG fellowship, Fringe First Award, NY Drama Critics Circle, L.A. Drama Critics Prize, and a Lucille Lortel Award. A former violence prevention specialist and H.I.V. educator, he lives in New York City.

Dave Malloy is a composer/writer/performer/orchestrator/Sound Designer. He has written eleven musicals, including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a slice of Tolstoy's War & Peace, now playing on Broadway; Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff; Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert's "Winterreise"; Black Wizard/Blue Wizard, an escapist RPG fantasy; Beowulf-A Thousand Years of Baggage, an anti-academia rock opera; Beardo, a retelling of the Rasputin myth; Sandwich, a musical about killing animals; and Clown Bible, Genesis to Revelation told through clowns. He has won two Obie Awards, the Richard Rodgers Award, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a Jonathan Larson Grant, and has been a MacDowell fellow and Composer-in-Residence at Ars Nova. Future projects include adaptations of Moby-Dickand Shakespeare's Henriad. He lives in Brooklyn. www.DaveMalloy.com

Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle) which includes the following plays: Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company), Paradise Blue (Williamstown Theatre Festival), and Detroit '67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include: Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theater); Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre) and Follow Me To Nellie's (Premiere Stages). She is an alumna of The Public Theater Emerging Writer's Group, Women's Project Lab, and Lark Playwrights Workshop and has developed work at Sundance Lab and Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Her work has been commissioned by the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Women's Project, South Coast Rep, People's Light and Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival/Penumbra Theatre. She currently serves as Executive Story Editor on the Showtime series "Shameless." Awards: Stavis Playwriting Award, NAACP Image Award, Spirit of Detroit Award, Weissberger Award, PoNY Fellowship, Sky-Cooper New American Play Prize, TEER Spirit Trailblazer Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama (Detroit '67), and OBIE Award (Skeleton Crew).

Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: Sweat (Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); By The Way, Meet Vera Stark; Ruined; Intimate Apparel; Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'knockers; and POOF!. Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Dramatist Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, Steinberg "Mimi" Distinguished Playwright Award, Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Obie Awards, Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards, Outer Critics Circle Award, AUDELCO Awards, Lilly Award, Helen Hayes Award, Lee Reynolds Award, NBT Fest's August Wilson Playwriting Award and a Guggenheim Grant. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild and the WGAE.

Signature celebrates playwrights and gives them an artistic home. By producing multiple plays by each of its resident writers, Signature offers an in-depth look at these writers' bodies of work. In addition, Signature engages the writer in every aspect of the creative process. Signature serves its mission through its permanent home at The Pershing Square Signature Center, a three-theatre facility on West 42nd Street designed by Frank Gehry Architects to host Signature's three distinct playwrights' residencies and foster a cultural community. At the Center, opened in January 2012, Signature continues its founding Playwrights-in-Residence model as Residency One, a first-of-its-kind, intensive exploration of a single writer's body of work. Residency Five was launched in 2012 to support multiple playwrights as they build bodies of work by guaranteeing each writer three productions over a five-year period. The Legacy Program, launched during Signature's 10th Anniversary Season, invites writers from both residencies back for productions of premiere or earlier plays. In 2014 Signature became the first New York City theatre to receive the Regional Theatre Tony Award.

The Pershing Square Signature Center is a major contribution to New York City's cultural landscape and provides a venue for cultural organizations that supports and encourages collaboration among artists throughout the space. In addition to its three intimate theatres, the Center features a Studio Theatre, rehearsal studio, and a public café, bar and bookstore. Through the Signature Ticket Initiative: A Generation of Access, Signature has also made an unprecedented commitment to making its productions accessible by underwriting the cost of initial run tickets, currently priced at $30, through 2031.

Founded in 1991 by James Houghton, Signature has presented entire seasons of the work of Edward Albee, Lee Blessing, Horton Foote, María Irene Fornés, Athol Fugard, John Guare, A.R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang, Bill Irwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Charles Mee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Paula Vogel, Naomi Wallace, August Wilson, Lanford Wilson, and a season celebrating the historic Negro Ensemble Company. Suzan-Lori Parks is the current Residency One playwright. Signature's current Residency Five playwrights are Annie Baker, Martha Clarke, Will Eno, Katori Hall, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan and ReGina Taylor. In addition to the Regional Theatre Tony Award®, Signature's productions and its resident writers have been recognized with the Pulitzer Prize, Lucille Lortel Awards, Obie Awards, Drama Desk Awards, and AUDELCO Awards, among many other distinctions.