Ariel Stess Wins 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize For KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA

Playwright Ariel Stess will receive one of the world’s most prestigious playwriting awards, the Yale Drama Series Prize, for her play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. Stess’s play was selected by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning playwright who has been on the Yale faculty since 2021, in his first year judging the competition. Jacobs-Jenkins recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Purpose and was also named one of TIME’s Top 100 Influential People.

On October 30, 2025, Stess will be honored at Yale Schwarzman Center with a staged reading  of KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA and the conferral of the $10,000 David Charles Horn  Prize. Long Wharf Theatre will be a partner in this celebratory event for a second consecutive year.  The highly anticipated play will be published by Yale University Press, which collaborates with the  David Charles Horn Foundation and Yale Schwarzman Center to administer the prize and bring  each year’s winning play to print.

KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is an occasionally off-kilter and deeply honest play about isolation, resilience, and the healing power of community. The play intertwines the lives of four women from different generations and social strata in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kara wakes up to find her husband and children missing. Twenty-year-old Emma runs away with a married man. Barbara’s ex-lover breaks into her home in the middle of the night. And the pipes in Miranda’s house burst. Through a tapestry of internal monologues and scenes, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA follows the journey of four women whose major life crises collide on Christmas Eve, leading them to accidentally help each other find a way out. 

Stess commented, "Thank you to the David Charles Horn Foundation, Yale Schwarzman Center, and Yale University Press. And thank you to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a playwright-hero whose work is hugely important to me, for the incredible honor of recognizing my play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. Winning the Yale Drama Series Prize is a thunderbolt of affirmation. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is a play about women who are isolated in their own shame. What they discover is that they need each other to get themselves out of this shame and isolation. At a time when we are hearing messages of polarization so loudly and so often, my hope is that this play reminds us we have much more in common with one another than we may realize. And in the end, no matter how many differences we have, we need each other to survive and thrive."

Jacob-Jenkins commented, "While a lot of the submissions I read worked very hard to knock a reader over the head with ‘formal inventiveness,’ Stess’s work stood out for the line-by-line sparkle and polish of its composition and the playwright’s cool confidence in the power of well-crafted language alone to transport an audience to and through the vast inner wilds of character. Sustained direct address is no small feat—but the weave of Stess’s storytelling, almost novelistic in texture, makes it look easy. It doesn’t hurt that the tale it tells of haves and have-nots across many vectors—gender, class, age—is so compelling and tenderly told. This is dramatic portraiture of the highest order.”

Francine Horn, director of the David Charles Horn Foundation, said, “In Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s first year judging, he truly couldn’t have picked a better play as the winner of the 18th Yale Drama Series competition. This play demonstrates how storytelling can be an act of resistance, intimacy, and liberation. This is exactly the kind of bold, necessary storytelling that the David Charles Horn Foundation is proud to support!”

Rachel Fine, Yale Schwarzman Center’s executive director, stated, “Ariel's exceptional talent and visionary approach to storytelling have made an indelible impact on the theater community early in this young playwright’s career. This recognition is a well-deserved testament to her dedication and creativity. We are proud to celebrate her accomplishments and look forward to witnessing all that she will bring to the world of theater and its audiences."

Shortlisted playwrights for the 2025 Yale Drama Prize were, in alphabetical order:  

Carolina Đỗ for ÃN CHÕI eat. play. rage. (A don't fuck with the weekend shift play)  Malena Malena Pennycook for How Should A Conversation Be? 

Marissa Joyce Stamps for Letiche and The [Wondrous] Pursuit of Elvi