Arizona Theatre Company Selects ARMOR As Winner Of Arizona Playwriting Award

Arizona Theatre Company announces the selection of Armor by Tucson writer Toni Press-Coffman as the winner of the 2010 Arizona Playwriting Award. Press-Coffman will receive a cash award and ATC will hold a private reading of her play. ATC's Arizona Playwriting Award recognizes an outstanding work for the stage by an Arizona writer.

The other finalists for the award were What You Don't Know by Phoenix playwright Larissa Brewington, A Work of Art by Tucson playwright Jonathan A. J. Northover and The Wake by Stephen Pass, also of Tucson.

Toni Press-Coffman's Armor is set in Washington D.C. and environs in the 21st century. Its main characters are a brilliant high school senior, Cynthia, and her father, Gene, a polymer scientist who is serving as a staff member on the House Armed Services Committee in an effort to develop better tank armor for United States troops in the Middle East. Having moved his family across the country to take the appointment, Gene is privy to a political battle over body armor - from which he tries and fails to distance himself. As Cynthia waits, hoping her father will "do the right thing," her mother cares for her younger brother - the victim of a car accident. Cynthia is a budding cellist and her mother is a pianist. The play is interspersed with cello and piano music that punctuate the piece's emotional ebb and flow.

TONI PRESS-COFFMAN was born and raised in the Bronx. She has written 20 plays which have been produced throughout the country. She has had work developed at the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Sundance Institute, Midwest Professional Playwrights Laboratory, and Minneapolis' Playwrights Center. In addition to writing plays, she has taught playwrights at the undergraduate and graduate levels and mentored them through her works as the Literary Manager of Tucson's Borderlands Theater, and taught K-5 children through a Tucson Pima Arts Council residency.

Created with a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Press-Coffman's Touch has been produced throughout the United States, including a 2003 Off-Broadway production and a production at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival. Her play on the Los Angeles riots, Trucker Rhapsody, was developed at Playlabs in Minneapolis in 2003 and subsequently produced in Indianapolis and San Francisco.

In 1999, she was awarded one of 10 NEA/TCG Playwright Residencies to develop her play Bodies and Hearts in the Face of the Monster with Indianapolis' Phoenix Theatre. Subsequently re-titled That Slut!, the play premiered at the Phoenix in 2001 and has been produced in San Francisco and Dallas. Her play Stand, which was developed at the Eugene O'Neill Playwright's Conference, received the Brodkin Award, given annually to support the career of an O'Neill playwright. It was produced at the Purple Rose Theatre outside Ann Arbor in 2002. Her play about Richard III, Two Days of Grace at Middleham, written in a rage about Shakespeare's acting as a Tudor propagandist, traveled to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in summer 2000 following productions in Tucson and San Francisco.

Both Touch and Holy Spirit on Grand Avenue won the bi-annual Arizona State University Playwriting Award.

Press-Coffman lives, writes, teaches and acts in Tucson. Armor is a Sloan Foundation commission.

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