Alabama Shakespeare Festival Reveals First New Southern Canon Commissions

Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Robert Schenkkan is among four prolific playwrights to be commissioned as part of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's (ASF) ambitious New Southern Canon, a multi-year commitment to developing 22 new plays about transformative moments in the South.

In addition to Schenkkan, the playwrights include: Brooklyn-based playwright-actor Donnetta Lavinia Grays; Lauren Gunderson, one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015; and Afro-Futurist writer Mansa Ra. Bios on each appear below.

“The vision of the Southern Writers Festival is to grow the Southern theater canon with stories steeped in specificity and reflective of the diversity of the region yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” said Rick Dildine, artistic director of ASF. “By telling the stories of our people and dramatizing our shared histories and unique narratives, we give voice to the communities of people who have called the South home for hundreds of years.”

Dildine expanded the scope of ASF's Southern Writers Project, which originated in 1991 and includes nearly 100 works to date, into a fully realized festival of new works and the largest and most ambitious commissioning program in the South. The enhanced program was announced in 2018 following a regional tour with Dildine and several playwrights, including Grays, to interview residents about the state of the South. The tour included 12 cities across seven states: Alabama (Anniston, Mobile, Montgomery), Arkansas (Elaine); Georgia (Atlanta); Louisiana (New Orleans); Mississippi (Jackson); South Carolina (Columbia, Greenville); Tennessee (Memphis, Nashville, Sewanee).

The newly commissioned work by the four playwrights will be incorporated into the ASF programming beginning in summer 2025. Additional playwrights will be selected in the ensuing years. All of the commissioned work will celebrate the important and lasting changes affecting the South's people, culture and land.