Donja R Love News

Broadway Black, the multimedia organization highlighting the achievements of Black theatre artists, will present the inaugural Antonyo Awards, a celebration of the Black Broadway and Off-Broadway community.

Six American playwrights have won a total of $150,000 as the 2020 winners of The New York Community Trust's Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting. The winners are Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Kimber Lee, Donja R. Love, Mona Mansour, Diana Oh, and Sung Rno.

The Broadway Podcast network will celebrate Pride month with a special section of the website highlighting a variety of programming to mark the occasion.

Broadway Black, the multimedia organization highlighting the achievements of Black theatre artists, has announced the inaugural Antonyo Awards, a celebration of the Black Broadway and Off-Broadway community.

The New Group continues its newly-launched live online conversation series, 'Why We Do It,' announcing a new slate of guests including Zoe Kazan (June 17), Nico Santos (June 24), Natasha Lyonne (July 1), Nat Wolff (July 8), Suzanne Vega (July 15), Clint Ramos (July 22) and Maulik Pancholy (July 29).

In celebration of Pride, Playbill and Pride Plays will present four live streamed readings of plays by and about the LGBTQIA+ community every Friday in June in support of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

The Dramatists Guild of America Council has selected Michael R. Jackson as the recipient of the 2019 Hull-Warriner Award, for his musical A Strange Loop. The other finalists for the award were Madeleine George for Hurricane Diane; Stephen Adly Guirgis for Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven and more.

a??a??a??a??a??a??a??The Drama League has announced the 2020 Drama League Awards Nominees for Outstanding Production of a Play, Outstanding Revival of a Play, Outstanding Production of a Musical, Outstanding Revival of a Musical, and the much- coveted Distinguished Performance Award.

The New Group is launching a live online conversation series with the company's community of artists entitled, 'Why We Do It.' The series commences on Wednesday, May 6 at 4:00PM EST with a conversation between Founding Artistic Director of The New Group, Scott Elliott and award-winning actor and director Cynthia Nixon.

Still in need of something new to listen to while stuck inside to get your Broadway fix? We've rounded up 10 MORE theatre-related podcasts that will help get you through!

Northlight Theatre, under the direction of Artistic Director BJ Jones and Executive Director Timothy J. Evans, announces its 46th season, opening with The Lifespan of a Fact by Jeremy Kareken & David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, directed by Halena Kays.

Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) has announced that Sanaz Toossi is the 2020 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award recipient for her play English. Sanaz receives the $10,000 award as well as the $10,000 Jay Harris Commission to write a new play.

Playwright Donja R. Love (one in two, Fireflies, Sugar in our Wounds) and Witness Uganda composers and lyricists Matt Gould (Jonathan Larson Grant winner; Lempicka) and Griffin Matthews ('Dear White People'), has secured the underlying rights for the new musical Drive Change, an incredible true story about the award-winning non-profit of the same name.

MCC Theater (Bob LuPone, Bernie Telsey, Will Cantler, Artistic Directors; Blake West, Executive Director) has announced the extension of the New York premiere of All the Natalie Portmans by C.A Johnson (MCC Theater's 2019/20 Tow Playwright in Residence) with direction by Kate Whoriskey. Previously scheduled for a limited run through March 15, All the Natalie Portmans will now play through Sunday, March 29 at the Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater at The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (511 West 52nd Street).

The Playwrights Realm (Founding Artistic Director Katherine Kovner and Producing Director Roberta Pereira) will presents the 2020 INK'D Festival of New Plays, showcasing new works by this year's Realm Writing Fellows Tanya Everett, Maya Macdonald, Tasha Gordon-Solmon, and Christopher Reyes (February 24-27). The festival's plays offer vast tonal and stylistic variation while cohering around complex contemplations of structural issues. INK'D has proven to be an indispensable launching pad for the voices driving the future of playwriting. This year's powerful slate continues to introduce audiences to a diversity of fresh perspectives, thereby underscoring theater's potential to expand the possibilities of dramatic storytelling and engage with the world around it.

BroadwayWorld's own Richard Ridge interviewed 'The Next Generation of Major Playwrights' at this weekend's BroadwayCon 2020!

In their continued and laudable feat of presenting diverse voices in theater, Orange County's South Coast Repertory is currently staging another stirring new drama, this time from playwright Donja R. Love entitled FIREFLIES, which continues performances through January 26, 2020 in Costa Mesa under the admirable direction of Lou Bellamy. At times heartbreaking and devastating, but ultimately empowering and (slightly) hopeful for future generations, FIREFLIES is a must-watch drama with searing emotions and real-world importance, highlighted by powerful performances from its two talented leads.

All 9 of our regular contributors have gathered: Aurin, Ben, David, Jack, Jose, Liz, Nicole, Patty, and PennyMaria! We're back together for our year-end spectacular, our annual episode in which we discuss the best and worst theater of the year.

When you consider that the two best-known plays by American authors dealing with the AIDS epidemic, Larry Kramer's THE NORMAL HEART and Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA, are both decades old and set in the 1980s, it's no wonder if playgoers tend to think of the crisis as something of the past which is now primarily under control. Even Matthew Lopez's current, THE INHERITANCE, though set in the 21st Century, focuses on the loss of gay men of that preceding generation.