BroadwayWorld Awards Database

In four decades as playwright, novelist, actor, and director, Alice Childress (1912-1994) challenged racism with engrossing stories and memorable characters. When a New York producer demanded revisions to soften the impact of Trouble in Mind, after an initial run Off Broadway and prior to its Broadway debut, Childress withdrew the script. Sixty-five years later, the Drama Desk celebrates the long-delayed Broadway premiere of this timeless masterpiece and salutes Childress as a towering figure in contemporary theater history.

Adam Rigg enhanced storytelling through wildly varying scenic designs this season including: a house in wood, shadow, and reflective glass that draws the audience into the Flint, Michigan water crisis in Cullud Wattah; a community cul-de-sac where trauma and history are celebrated in On Sugarland; and the falling walls, flower-covered hillsides, and functional seaside fun ride of The Skin of Our Teeth.

This season, as a woman hiding her brother from the Taliban in Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul and an English instructor straddling two very different cultures in Sanaz Toossi’s English, Marjan Neshat embodied disparate characters so fully that it was hard to recognize the single actor in the two roles. Whether in drama or comedy, Neshat mines the playwright’s text for a vast panoply of emotions that yield vivid, intricate portrayals of the parts she undertakes.

Emerging talent

For reprising her outstanding performance in How I Learned to Drive two decades later.

English (Atlantic Theater Company) and Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons)

On Sugarland, Black No More, Wedding Band, Corsicana, Soft, What to Send Up When It Goes Down

For the completion and producing of The Rhinebeck Panorama

Cullud Wattah (The Public), Oratorio for Living Things (Ars Nova), The Nosebleed (Lincoln Center Theater), Golden Shield (MTC), Snow in Midsummer (CSC), Fairycakes (Greenwich House), and What You Are Now (EST)