Latest news with #SusanSmithBlackburnPrize
Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
1536 review — terrible Tudor drama descends into TikTok soap opera
Where to begin with this one? Commissioned as part of the new writers programme at London's Almeida theatre, Ava Pickett's debut, set in the year that Anne Boleyn was put to death, was the winner of last year's Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for women playwrights, and won a commendation in the George Devine Awards. All those judges clearly saw something in the script that escapes me completely. What you actually get is the kind of simplistic, feminist-lite drama about the evils of patriarchy that you normally encounter in a one-hour slot at the Edinburgh Fringe, where my instinct would be not to write a review to spare the feelings of everyone involved. And yet here it is, installed at the Almeida, one of London's
Los Angeles Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Furlough's Paradise' imagines utopia for two Black cousins on a quest for liberty
Playwright a.k. payne, who studied under Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney at Yale, chooses not to capitalize their name. They (note the choice of pronoun) don't wish to have their identity determined by suspect structures. This biographical information is pertinent to payne's 'Furlough's Paradise,' which won the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and is now having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. The play, a two-hander directed by Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, concerns two bracingly intelligent Black cousins who grew up together but whose lives have diverged. On the surface, not much connects these characters, but surfaces can mislead. Once as close as siblings, these cousins are trying in their different ways to imagine a world that will allow them to discover themselves outside of inherited assumptions and oppressive hierarchies. Mina (Kacie Rogers), a graduate of an Ivy League school, works for Google and lives with her white girlfriend, Chelsea, in Los Angeles. Sade (DeWanda Wise), whose name is pronounced shah-day, like the singer, has been granted a weekend furlough from prison to attend the funeral of her mother. They have not seen each since Sade was sent to jail. Mina's father died during this period, and she now keeps a small apartment in her hometown, a kind of safe house that allows her to commune with her past and escape from the endless striving of California. (The location is unnamed but described in the program as a U.S. Great Migration city in late 2017, so perhaps Pittsburgh, where the playwright has roots.) The death of Sade's mother, the twin of Mina's father, is an occasion for a double mourning. But it's also an opportunity for a double rebirth. Mina and Sade are witnesses not only to each other but also to the conditions that formed and deformed their dreams. 'Furlough's Paradise' is a small play that expands outward to the social and metaphysical worlds, not unlike McCraney's 'The Brothers Size,' a palpable influence. Projection designers Yee Eun Nam and Elizabeth Barrett create a kaleidoscopic background on Chika Shimizu's pied-à-terre set. With help from Pablo Santiago's lighting and Cricket S. Myers' sound design, the production magnifies in cinematic fashion the inner lives of the characters. This lyrical drama, choreographed by Dell Howlett, floats at times like a movement-theater piece reaching for the heavens. The acting is grounded in realism but the writing refuses to keep the characters under lock and key. Life may have thrown up walls but nothing can block their yearning. What does liberty mean and how can it be lived in an unfree world? (The word 'liberty' is projected onto the set along with other thematically relevant vocabulary at the start of the play.) Mina shares her dream of raising children outside of the fixed binaries of gender. Sade reveals the utopia she and her girlfriend, along with other fellow inmates, have been imagining, a collective portrait of a peaceful haven for 'free formerly incarcerated Black girls.' The cousins are content to spend the weekend holed up with each other, sorting through the past and measuring the distance between them. Costume designer Celeste Jennings illustrates their differences through clothing choices that reflect Sade's more marginalized status and Mina's more assimilated reality. Mina is surprised that Sade isn't more eager to exploit her weekend out of jail, but Sade relishes the freedom to just be. Accustomed to not having options, she's perhaps better able to appreciate the quiet togetherness of being holed up in her cousin's apartment. They watch TV and movies, eat cereal, play music and resurrect the cast of characters from their youth. August Wilson made it his mission to put the rituals of Black life onstage, to give representation to the daily customs of a people who had been denied visibility in mainstream culture. Payne follows suit, though the references in 'Furlough's Paradise' are largely from pop culture ('The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,' 'The Proud Family' and 'The Cheetah Girls') and the name-checking can sometimes seem slightly pandering, a playwright pushing easy buttons. But the play digs deep into the challenge of shaping a life into something that doesn't feel like a betrayal. Mina resents when Sade harps on the inequities of their childhoods. She thinks her cousin is making excuses for some bad choices. But Sade reminds Mina that small differences in parental belief and imagination can make a world of difference. Mina's father flouted strictures; Sade's mother subjugated herself to them — that is, until Sade went to jail on a serious felony and compassion for her daughter awakened her long-dormant maternal loyalty. 'Furlough's Paradise' makes the case that character isn't defined by elite education or criminal record. (The exact nature of Sade's crime goes unstated.) Our identities are a complicated calculus of opportunity and challenge. If being alone is the eternal problem, as Sade and Mina seem to acknowledge, love, in all its gnarly reality, is the only way to be truly seen. The kinetic staging, while keeping the action from becoming claustrophobic, sometimes oversteps the mark. The skips in time that occur in the play are unnecessarily italicized. The choreography is refreshing but might be more so with a little more restraint. What distinguishes payne as a rising talent is the breadth of human understanding that makes the characters of 'Furlough's Paradise' seem like old friends by the end of the drama. Rogers' Mina and Wise's Sade are so singularly and contrastingly themselves that it's not clear how they will ever reconcile their versions of the past. But this reunion catalyzes their desire to connect the dots that constitute their parallel lives. 'Furlough's Paradise' makes you care deeply about what will happen to Mina and Sade once the authorities come to collect Sade. I left the theater wishing not only the playwright a safe journey but also the play's characters.
Los Angeles Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The freedoms of a.k. payne's award-winning abolition play ‘Furlough's Paradise,' onstage and off
Among the notes included in the 'Furlough's Paradise' script is an etymology of the word 'furlough' — as in, 'permission, liberty granted to do something.' Its various definitions throughout the history of language make clear that, whether by going away, retreating from or abstaining from having to do with, to leave is, essentially, to allow to survive. This idea is at the core of a.k. payne's moving two-hander, which stars DeWanda Wise and Kacie Rogers as estranged cousins — one on a three-day furlough from prison, another an Ivy League graduate on a break from her tech job — who reunite in their hometown for a funeral. They begin to process their conflicting memories, clarify their respective resentments, share their dreams of freedom and, in the safety of each other's company, they each allow themselves to let go of everything to just be who they are, wholly and fully, alongside the one person in the world who sees them in their entirety. The West Coast premiere of 'Furlough's Paradise' — which just won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the prestigious international award that honors women+ playwrights — is directed by Tinashe Kajese-Bolden and runs through May 18 at the Geffen Playhouse. Between rehearsals, payne tells The Times about the real-life inspirations for these onstage cousins, the necessity of a choreographer for this production and the lessons learned from their graduate school professor, Geffen Playhouse artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What inspired this play? The play first was conceived when I was in grad school, but I was thinking about it for years before then, without the language for it. The initial impulse came from my own curiosity around the ways that incarceration impacts families. Where I'm from, everybody who is Black in our city has a reference point to the Allegheny County Jail, which is in the middle of Pittsburgh. My earliest memories are writing letters to family members who were incarcerated; as a young person, seeing family who was in that place transformed how I saw the world. I also wanted to write a play that was inspired by the relationship between my cousin and I. We're both only children; we're almost siblings. And though the play traffics realism and has an illusion of realism, I'm really passionate about it not being a living room play; it's a play about the Afro-surreal and the ways that Black life is always a little bit askew, like our experience of it doesn't always match the way people perceive it or understand it. Who are these two characters to you? Frederick Douglass talks about being free in form versus free in fact — the idea of seeking a freedom in your mind and how you see the world, and the fact that systems of oppression and power don't get all of us because we're able to imagine alternative ways to exist. Both of these characters are wrestling with real instances of denials of freedoms, and I want this play to invite us to see the ways that these different systems have impacted both of them. Because Sade's body is physically incarcerated, she really fights for her mind to be free. She stands on business, she speaks truth and names things as they are, and she doesn't shy away from that. There's something honorable about her absolute refusal to lie or cheat, even in the midst of what this world has deemed criminal, and the ways in which people who have committed crimes are not always seen in their full humanity or in their integrity. That's why Sade is so clear about what her dreams are. I wanted to really center that in the play because it's important to listen to folks who have existed inside and honor the dreams of those who are most affected by these systems. Mina is trying to be free in many different ways. The life she's lived has colonized her mind, her body, everything, and she's fighting to let herself feel comfortable in a space for a few days. She can't even find the language for what her dreams are because she's trying to free her tongue from these institutions. So though the play started as a love letter to a lot of my family who've been affected by incarceration, I wanted to also draw a love letter to versions of myself and my friends who have been in academic institutions, and have really suffered as Black and brown people and people of color in these spaces. What do you hope audiences experience during these three days with Mina and Sade? Sometimes it's hard to sit in the rehearsal room with this play, because I want another world for these characters; I want to just get them out of this room and get them somewhere else, away from everything. Who were they before all the stuff they put on each other, and how can they be able to just not have to carry all of that? To me, that's evocative of what abolition means; it's the capacity to exist together, and to break apart the rigid ways that we contain and police ourselves. So my hope is that audiences watch the play and want to create alternative spaces for Black people to actually be and exist and care for each other, and cherish being present with each other without being confined. Geffen Playhouse's artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney, also the chair of playwriting at Yale School of Drama, described you as 'one of the most powerful writers I've encountered in my time as a professor.' What was it like to be taught by him? Tarell is an extraordinary teacher and mentor, as well as artist, of course. I started at Yale School of Drama in 2019 — I had gone straight through from undergrad, which was really difficult because of the elitism, the white supremacy and all the things. Tarell was extraordinary at crafting an oasis and fugitive space within an institution that honestly had caused a lot of harm for so many people who looked like me. Grad school had its challenges, but the community I found in the playwriting department was such a gift. Our entire nine-person cohort was students of color, and Tarell created a horizontal leadership model in the program that allowed me to feel supported as an artist and a full person, where you can really listen to your own voice as a playwright and trust that voice. He created such fertile ground for exploration and play. 'Furlough's Paradise' made its world premiere at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre last year. What did you learn from that staging that you're integrating into this one? One of the biggest things is embodiment — it's an endless question and the conundrum of being a Black writer in America and writing in English. I love this quote by Ntozake Shange: 'i cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i was taught to hate myself in.' That feels so relevant to how I think about language — there's the constant awareness that this is a colonial language that my people were forced to speak, and so much that we do and experience just cannot fit into English. So in this rendition, I've been thinking more about the body. Mina and Sade keep doing these comparisons [of each other] where, in all of that language, there's no space to actually fully see both of them. But in these dream sequences at night, we see what they're wrestling with outside of language. My hope is that those allow us to go to the limits of language, and see what our bodies do when language isn't enough. There were movement consultants for a few gestural beats in other renditions, but having choreographers from day one of this process has been incredible. How did you first start writing plays? I grew up doing some musicals and operas in Pittsburgh, and my mom is a music teacher so I was always in her choirs. When I went to an arts magnet school, I majored in literary arts, and I wrote my first play in seventh grade. I entered it in City Theatre's Young Playwrights Contest and I remember being in rehearsals for my play and thinking, 'I love making stuff, being with people and imagining stuff together. I just want to do this forever.' Theater making for me is not just about my own little independent vision; there's so much collaboration that goes into a show and I love making space on the page for other artists. In undergrad, I directed a lot because I didn't see the spaces that I wanted to create work in and I didn't feel comfortable acting. I didn't really feel there were structures for the work I wanted to write. But I fell in love with the practice of making theater and building ensemble to support that — specifically Black theater, the histories of Black theater and the ways that Black theater artists have imagined alternate worlds. What structures can theater institutions prioritize to encourage more of the work you want to make? Institutions are trying to improve things — even Tarell being here [at the Geffen] and being deeply committed to the work of Black and brown people and bringing in voices that are not traditionally in white American theater spaces. But I find it critical to create alternative spaces entirely, because there's always going to be a limit to what institutions that are not owned by us can do. I love the concepts of fugitivity and how people have created spaces that are not always visible to the institutional or public eye, that go deeper and aren't necessarily trying to be big or fit into the systems. I wonder if there are ways that larger institutions can support many different kinds of theater making, like pouring into smaller artist collectives in a way that enables them to create with autonomy. I'm also obsessed with maroonage, a Black cultural tradition in which people who were enslaved would escape to the mountains and form independent communities. In a theatrical tradition, what does it mean to create our own stuff and center our own gaze in our making of things? I've been building a theater collective in line with these things, and it's Black folks who gather by bodies of water and just make experimental stuff. This past summer, we gathered in New Rochelle and did double Dutch lessons, clowning classes and Pilates. Spaces like that are so critical to creating community and ensemble, which is hard when working on a small play like 'Furlough's Paradise.' So for the next renditions on the East Coast next year, I'm hoping to gather all the artists working on it [at the various theaters] and spend three days mapping out freedom dreams.
Euronews
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
American playwright ak payne wins Susan Smith Blackburn Prize
American playwright ak payne has won this year's Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an international prize that recognises women+ writing theatre in English. ADVERTISEMENT Founded in 1978, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the longest-running prize in English theatre for female and nonbinary playwrights. American writer ak payne has won the 2025 prize for their play "Furlough's Paradise", which they describe as a 'lyrical journey about grief, home, and survival.' "Furlough's Paradise" was nominated by Atlanta's Alliance Theatre, which premiered the play in 2024. Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden is now set to take it to the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. Telling the story of two cousins, Sade and Mina, the play focuses on their relationship as they meet at the funeral of their mother and aunt while Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina is away from her high-flying career. Through these two cousins, the play examines what it means to be a Black woman in today's America. At the announcement ceremony, payne said: 'I am so grateful to receive this award and join a list of some of my favourite writers whose plays have shaken how I understand the world and who have made it possible'. Kai Heath and Asha Basha Duniani in the Alliance Theatre production Greg Mooney As the overall winner, payne received $25,000 (€23,000), as well as a signed print by renowned artist Willem de Kooning, created especially for the prize. 'At this moment in our history as a country, and as a Prize which honours women, trans and non-binary writers, we must acknowledge the very real threats that are being aimed at our hard-won freedoms. We must remind ourselves of the power of our voices, and the special magic we create when we lift them at the theatre. Every voice on our stage tonight deserves to be honoured, celebrated and heard,' Leslie Swackhamer executive director of the prize said. payne has been a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize twice before. This year, the prize chose to award two special commendations and $10,000 (€9,200) to "49 Days" by Haruna Lee and "An Oxford Man" by Else Went. Six other finalists also received prizes of $5,000 (€4,600). Playwright ak payne Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Past Winners of the Prize include Annie Baker, Caryl Churchill, Lucy Kirkwood, and Lucy Prebble. Last year's Winner, "1536" by Ava Pickett, is set to premiere in Europe at the Almeida Theatre in London in May, directed by Olivier-winner Lindsey Turner.
Euronews
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Finalists named for longest-running women+'s playwrighting prize
The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize is the longest-running prize in theatre that celebrates women+ writing in English. Founded in 1978 after Susan Smith Blackburn, an alumna of the Smith College in Massachusetts who died in 1977, it has annually recognised incredible contributions to the art form. Previous winners include some of the last half-century's most influential writers, including later Pulitzer Prize-winners Lynn Nottage and Annie Baker, as well as some of Britain's celebrated writers such as Caryl Churchill and Lucy Prebble. In total, 11 winners of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. 2025's winner will be announced in New York City at Playwrights Horizons on 10 March. The winner will receive $25,000 (€24,000) and a signed and numbered print by artist Willem de Kooning commissioned for the prize. Judges will also award a special commendation prize of $10,000 (€9,600) to one of the nominees with each of the nine finalists receiving $5,000 (€4,800). This year's finalists include four US playwrights, alongside two from Britain, and individual writers from Ireland, Australia, and a Taiwanese-Japanese-US writer. They were picked from 200 plays from a pool of 400 theatres from North America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and the UK who could submit pieces that they had produced or are planning to produce. It's hoped that the prize can help get women+ writers' work to be more easily made and foster a greater international exchange of plays. Of the European productions nominated, there is the latest play by Australian playwright Suzie Miller, who shot to fame in the UK for her lauded legal drama 'Prima Facie', which had a West End run starring Jodie Comer as a London judge faced with defending her son who is accused of rape. Miller has been nominated for her newest play 'Inter Alia' which will premiere at London's National Theatre in July starring Rosamund Pike. Also from London is 'Otherland' by Chris Bush, one of Britain's most successful contemporary playwrights. Currently in rehearsal for a run at the Almeida Theatre starting 12 February, 'Otherland' discovers how life can open up for a couple after they untangle themselves from a break-up. The final UK production nominated is Scottish writer Isobel McArthur's play 'The Fair Maid of the West' which ran with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon last November. A modernisation of the Thomas Heywood's Elizabethan-era work, it plays into McArthur's particular skill for bringing older pieces into new relevance, as seen with her Olivier Award-winning play 'Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)'. Alongside these plays, Irish playwright Carys Coburn has also been nominated for her show 'BÁN' by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Loosely based on Lorca's 'House of Bernarda Alba', Coburn puts the story of a powerful matriarch and her five daughters in a 1980s Irish setting. The full nominees are as follows: Chris Bush (UK) 'Otherland' Carys Coburn (Ireland) 'BÁN' Keiko Green (US) 'You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World' Haruna Lee (Taiwan-Japan-US) '49 Days' Isobel McArthur (UK-Scotland) 'The Fair Maid of the West' Suzie Miller (Australia-UK) 'Inter Alia' a.k. payne (US) 'Furlough's Paradise' Else Went (US) 'An Oxford Man'
