Amy Berryman Receives Cornelia Street American Playwriting Award

Rising Phoenix Repertory has announced Amy Berryman as the recipient of this year’s Cornelia Street American Playwriting Award. The honor is presented to an emerging playwright of exceptional work ethic, character, and talent. 

The award takes its name from Cornelia Street in the West Village, which has been home to the work of some of the nation’s greatest playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Maria Irene Fornés, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare, and was also the location of Caffe Cino, one of the birthplaces of the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement. 

The Cornelia Street American Playwriting Award carries a cash prize, and previous recipients are Ren Dara Santiago (The Siblings Play, The MTA Radio Plays at Rattlestick), Ryan Haddad (Hi, Are You Single? at The Public, Wooly Mammoth/IAMA) and Larry Powell (The Gaze).

About the playwright, Rising Phoenix Rep’s artistic director Daniel Talbott enthused, “Amy is an extraordinary talent, friend, and collaborator. We feel so lucky to be able to honor her with this year’s award. She’s exceptional, and her writing has both intellectual fierceness and deep, emotional humanity.”

Meghan Pressman, Managing Director/CEO of Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, (where Berryman is a member of this year’s Writers' Workshop) shared that the recognition was well deserved. “I’m so in awe of Amy’s dedication to the craft of writing,” she said, “from her boundless energy and commitment to a myriad of inventive projects to her support and teaching of other emerging writers. She’s smart, kind, talented and one of our rising stars.” 

Amy Berryman is a playwright, screenwriter, actor, and teaching artist originally from Seattle by way of West Texas. Her play Walden, produced by Sonia Friedman and directed by Ian Rickson, premiered on London’s West End in May 2021. Walden was also produced at TheaterWorks Hartford in August 2021, directed by Mei Ann Teo, and received a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Other full-length plays include The New Galileos (O’Neill Finalist 2019); Three Year Summer; Epiphany, Or What Would You? (Finalist for Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, O'Neill Semi-Finalist 2020); and The Whole of You, commissioned for Rising Phoenix Rep. Her work has been developed at Premiere Stages, Kitchen Dog, Caltech, East 15, Portland Stage, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Valdez Last Frontier Theatre Conference, and AMiOS, among others. Amy recently received a commission from Manhattan Theatre Club, will be a MacDowell Fellow later this year, and is a member of Center Theatre Group's Writers' Workshop 2023. amy-berryman.com

Winner of the Lucille Lortel Award, Caffe Cino Fellowship, and New York Innovative Theatre Award, Rising Phoenix Repertory was founded in 1999 by Artistic Director Daniel Talbott. The company produces primarily new plays – both in the Indie Theatre and Off-Broadway – in traditional spaces and site-specifically around New York City and regionally. Productions include The Siblings Play by Ren Dara Santiago (produced with Rattlestick), The Convent by Jessica Dickey (produced with Weathervane and Rattlestick), Thieves (with Weathervane), A Fable (with piece by piece productions and Rattlestick), the Lucille Lortel Award-winning Off-Broadway run of All the Rage (with piece by piece and The Barrow Group), 3C (with piece by piece and Rattlestick), Elective Affinities (produced site-specifically with piece by piece and Soho Rep), Slipping (with piece by piece and Rattlestick), and Too Much Memory (with piece by piece), which transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop’s Fourth Street Theatre after winning the FringeNYC award for Outstanding Play in 2008. Rising Phoenix Repertory produces an ongoing series called Cino Nights, inspired by Joe Cino and his Caffe Cino – one of the original birthplaces of Off-Off-Broadway theatre – for which the company has commissioned over twenty playwrights to write new, full-length plays, which are fully produced site-specifically on a shoestring budget. Two volumes of Cino Nights plays have been published by The New York Theatre Experience, and the company has published a theater magazine called Caffe Cino (edited by Talbott and Steve McMahon), available in bookstores and online.