Pearl Cleage And David Greenspan Honored With 2025 Legacy Playwright Awards

Esteemed American Playwrights Pearl Cleage and David Greenspan have been announced as the 2025 recipients of the Legacy Playwright Awards.

The Legacy Playwrights Initiative (LPI) celebrates the achievements of influential playwrights whose work merits greater visibility, particularly those who have fallen out of the public eye. The program offers financial support and professional advocacy to honor each Legacy Playwright’s lifetime of contributions to the theatre.

The Initiative includes two annual Legacy Playwright Awards, advocacy for the professional production and reissuing of honorees’ works, educational programs to raise awareness in the theatre field and academia, and filmed interviews documenting each playwright’s career. Over the course of the award year, the LPI team collaborates with honorees to tailor support to their artistic and personal goals.

“To be able to spend my life as a working playwright is a great blessing and an endless challenge,” Cleage said. “To be honored by my peers for doing the work I love is a true pleasure, and I'm just getting started good!”

Cleage, an Atlanta-based playwright and novelist, serves as Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and as Atlanta’s first Poet Laureate. A graduate of Spelman College, she has received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award and the Paul Robeson Award from Actors’ Equity Foundation.

Her fifteen plays include Blues for an Alabama Sky—recently staged at London’s National Theatre—and Flyin’ West, which became the most produced new play in America after premiering at the Alliance in 1992. She is also the author of eight novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (an Oprah Book Club selection) and Baby Brother’s Blues, which won an NAACP Image Award for fiction. Cleage’s recent projects include the documentary Live at Club Zebra! and the upcoming play Flying Fish & Folding Money.

“Needless to say, receipt of this award was totally unanticipated, and I'm rather stunned to be a recipient,” Greenspan said. “My stated goal as a playwright and actor is to entertain and engage audiences intellectually and emotionally. I cannot adequately express my deep gratitude to the Dramatists Guild Foundation for this honor.”

Greenspan’s career as a playwright and performer spans acclaimed works such as Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, and I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees. His solo projects include The Argument, The Myopia, and solo renditions of The Patsy, Strange Interlude, and Four Saints in Three Acts.

He has also appeared in productions of The Boys in the Band, Some Men, and Prince Faggot, among others. His honors include Guggenheim, Lortel, and Fox fellowships; Alpert, Lambda Literary, and Helen Merrill Playwriting awards; and six Obie Awards.

About the Legacy Playwrights Initiative

Past honorees include Ed Bullins, Carlyle Brown, Frank Chin, Constance Congdon, Migdalia Cruz, Philip Kan Gotanda, Cherríe Moraga, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, and Richard Wesley.

The Initiative was conceived by Anne Cattaneo, Rachel Routh, Benita Hofstetter Koman, Todd London, and collaborators across the theatre field. It is supported by the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation, the Dramatists Guild Foundation, the Ettinger Foundation, and individual donors. Partners include Broadway Play Publishing, Concord Theatricals, Dramatists Play Service, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and the National New Play Network.

For more information or to donate, visit legacyplaywrightsinitiative.org.