4th Wall Theatre Company to Present Reading of FURLOUGH'S PARADISE a.k. payne.

4th Wall Theatre Company will present public readings of Furlough's Paradise, the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner by a.k. payne. Two performances will be presented with the playwright in attendance: Saturday, January 17 at 7:30 PM and Sunday, January 18 at 2:30 PM.

The play centers around cousins Sade and Mina, raised like sisters but now leading very different lives, return to their childhood town for the funeral of their mother and aunt. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. Traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull them apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer's arrival.

Founded in Houston, and awarded annually since 1978, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the largest and oldest international award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. Women+ includes trans and nonbinary playwrights. Past winners of the Prize include Marsha Norman, Caryll Churchill, Julia Cho, Wendy Wasserstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Ruhl and Lynn Nottage.

4th Wall Theatre Company is honored to partner with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for the third time to present this staged reading in Houston. These readings offer a unique opportunity for audiences to engage with celebrated new works and to meet the playwright in person.

Earlier last year in New York City, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize announced Furlough's Paradise by a.k. payne as the 2025 winner of the Prize. Payne received a $25,000 cash award and a signed limited-edition print by renowned artist Willem De Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The remaining finalists for the 2025 Prize each received awards of $5,000.

In the last 45 years, 494 plays have been honored as finalists of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Many of the winners have gone on to receive other top honors, including Olivier, Lilly, Evening Standard and Tony Awards for Best Play. Eleven Susan Smith Blackburn finalists have subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The Prize has also fostered an interchange of plays between the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries.