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The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama
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The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama recognize a master
American dramatist and an American playwright in mid-career, both of
whose literary achievements are vividly apparent in the rich and
striking language of their work. The former receives a rare first
edition of dramatic literature, the latter a $7,500 stipend. The awards
were developed to reflect Laura Pels’ dedication to supporting
excellence in American theater, as well as PEN’s commitment to
recognizing and rewarding the literary accomplishments of playwrights.
2005 judges: Craig Lucas, Charles Mee, and Lynn Nottage
Please click here for more information on the award. |
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The 2005 Honorees
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To an American playwright in mid-career: Dael Orlandersmith
Poetic, raw, brave, funny, tragic, rebellious, compassionate, angry,
ugly, maddening, beautiful, and fiercely human; Orlandersmith’s work
miraculously manages to be all of these things at once. She is unafraid
to venture into troubling and controversial territory to bring us
compelling stories that bare witness to the diversity of the American
experience. Her deep reservoir of characters is filled with
damaged fragile people who share their tales with a naked
urgency. In her hands the truth is a bitter yet welcome pill,
that’s delivered with poetic insight and words that flow so deliciously
that they make you sway. As a poet, playwright, and performer,
she is equally gifted and as such, the American theater is enriched and
enlivened by her presence.
To a master American dramatist: Wallace Shawn
Wallace Shawn has been ahead of the avant-garde for forty years. In
form and content, he has shown the way to a new kind of theater, a
theater able to contain sex and politics and history and heartache and
remorse, longing and confusion, the horrors of self-knowledge, deep and
complex thought as well as deep and complex feeling, and to show us, in
ways we would never otherwise have known so well, what it is to be a
human being.
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