Barrington Stage Company Announces Winners of the 2021 Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award

Barrington Stage Company has announced the winners of the 2021 Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award. The award, founded in 2018, supports new, bold voices for the American theatre and is presented to unproduced full-length works that are wholly original and not adaptations or translations of existing works.

The 2021 Grand Prize winner is Daniella De Jesús for her play, Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back. She will receive a cash prize of $25,000, a staged reading and a possible full production of her play at Barrington Stage Company.

The Burman Award is also presenting $5,000 prizes to Miki Kim for her play, After the Fall, and Laura Winters for her play, Just the Melody. Both plays will also receive staged readings at BSC.

Additional finalists included Lyons Pride by Bleu Beckford-Burrell, Flood by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, You're Crazy by Steph Del Rosso, Campaign by Laura Jacqmin, 2020: a going away party play by Keyanna Khatiblou and Spare Rib by Winter Miller.

"It's crucial to all of us at Barrington Stage to help develop new voices and new plays," commented Ms. Boyd. "That's why the Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award is especially welcome, by supporting new, original plays by emerging artists. We look forward to the readings of the winning plays and hearing more from these exciting and promising talents."

The Adjudication Panel included Ken Cerniglia, dramaturg (Hadestown); Deadria Harrington, Producing Artistic Leader of The Movement Theatre Company; Eric Keen-Louie, Producing Director of La Jolla Playhouse; Natasha Sinha, Associate Artistic Director at Playwrights Horizons and Julianne Boyd, Founder/Artistic Director, Barrington Stage Company. The Burman New Play Award Project Coordinator was Megan Nussle.

The Burman Award previously presented the Grand Prize to Stacey Rose for her play America v. 2.1: The Sad Demise & Eventual Extinction of The American Negro; with additional awards presented to Brent Askari for his play American Underground and Christina Quintana for her play Citizen Scientist. Both Rose's and Askari's plays received world premiere productions at BSC in 2019.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER:

Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back
By Daniella De Jesús

Daniella De Jesús is an actor/writer from Bushwick, Brooklyn. A member of The Public Theater's 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group, her plays include Mambo Sauce (The New Group Off Stage, semi-finalist for Clubbed Thumb's 2018 commission), Pa' Ti Tengo De Todo (The Public Theater's Spotlight Series), Untitled Puppet Show (commissioned by The Public Theater for Play At Home) and The Thief Cometh (United SoloFestival). She's also the creator of the new web series "Talk To Me" on IGTV. As an actor, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix's "Orange is the New Black." De Jesús is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama.

Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back is a dark comedic exploration of the insidiousness of colonization. While studying abroad in Spain, Solandra, a young Dominican-American woman, finds herself alone in the throne room of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand, whose portraits come alive, transporting her to 1492. Meanwhile, on the island of what we now refer to as "hispaniola," Anacaona awakens, terrorized by a violent nightmare, which she soon learns is prophetic. As Anacaona struggles to save her community from invasion, Solandra contends with her racial identity, attraction to white men and their attraction to her.

ADDITIONAL PRIZE WINNERS

After the Fall
By Miki Kim

Miki Kim is a native Hawai'ian playwright. She received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her play, A Tita, ABroad, a one-woman show about moving to the continental United States from Hawai'i, was the recipient of two Los Angeles Dramalogue awards. Her screenplay, Fixing Jane, was a finalist in VisionFest and the Houston Comedy Festival. As an actor, she has worked with theatres such as the Milwaukee Rep and the California Shakespeare Festival. She has studied with the Suzuki Theatre Company in Japan, but Miki's wildest acting credit is Lin Tan Cang, the wife of Braddock (Chuck Norris) in Braddock: Missing in Action III. After the Fall was selected for a staged reading at the Blank Theatre in Hollywood, California and was also the winner of the 2019 Austin Film Festival

After the Fall is a poignant, funny and provocative look into the lives of "collateral damage" in the years following Vietnam and the Secret War in Laos. Vietnamese and Hmong civilians, and the generations that follow, are forced to silently carry the unrelenting horror and scars of war. Abby - an Asian-American public defender in Los Angeles -is not only single and pregnant, she's the primary caregiver for her adoptive father, a Vietnam veteran in the late stages of dementia. When she's assigned to defend a Laotian Hmong man accused of murdering four white hunters, she accepts the help of an enigmatic Vietnamese nurse to care for her father. The case and the nurse push Abby into the world of war and a culture she has ignored most of her life.

Just the Melody
By Laura Winters

Laura Winters is a playwright and screenwriter working in NYC and LA. Full-length plays include Just the Melody (formerly Biting Hands - Relentless Award Honorable Mention, Drama League Next Stage Residency through director Ashley Brooke Monroe, Princess Grace Award Semi-Finalist, SPACE at Ryder Farm Creative Residency Finalist, Semi-Finalist for Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor), Gonzo (Burman New Play Award Semi-Finalist, Rough Draft Festival, Corkscrew), Emerson Losing Her "Miand" (Semi-Finalist in The Bechdel Test Festival, NY Winterfest Dixon Place), Coronation (Pete's Candy Store, Bechdel Group) and a full-length children's play Space Mission #5379: Saving Rachel, Nevada (world premiere East Valley Children's Theatre, winner of Arizona Theatre Excellence Award for Best Original Script).

In Just the Melody, potential couple Lucy and Alfonso have a lot in common: they both love jazz, hate incompetent ER nurses and are quadriplegics who use text-to-speech technology to speak. Their mothers only see differences. Alfonso's mom writes off any girl who isn't a Spanish-speaking Ph. D. candidate. Lucy's mom won't let her date, period. With Lucy's 18th birthday looming, she grows desperate to find a way to date Alfonso and assert her independence, and eventually convinces her deadbeat brother-in-law to help her sell her pain medication. Just the Melody is equal parts hilarious coming-of-age story and a brutal dissection of disability, class and race in present-day America.