Erika Dickerson-Despenza | |
---|---|
Born | Chicago, Illinois |
Occupation | Playwright |
Alma mater | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
Notable awards |
Erika Dickerson-Despenza is an American playwright. She won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2021 for her play, cullud wattah.
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Dickerson-Despenza graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in English education from the School of Education. [1] [2] While at UW–Madison, she started a theater company, The For Colored Girls Project. [3]
After graduating, Dickerson-Despenza took on teaching jobs. She moved to New York and took a position with People's Theatre Project. [3] In 2019, Dickerson-Despenza quit her non-theatre job to pursue playwriting full time. [4] She was The Public Theater's 2019-2020 Tow Foundation playwright-in-residence. [5]
Dickerson-Despenza's play, cullud wattah, received its first staged reading at Jackalope Theatre in Chicago in 2018. [6] The play follows three generations of Black women living through the Flint, Michigan water crisis. It was featured on the 2019 Kilroys' List, as was Dickerson-Despenza's play, [hieroglyph]. [7] [8] The Public Theatre had slated cullud wattah to be staged in the summer of 2020, which would have been Dickerson-Despenza's first professional production. However, the production was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [4] Despite the suspension of all performances of the play, cullud wattah won the 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. [9] cullud wattah opened at The Public Theatre in NYC in November 2021, under the direction of Candis C. Jones. [6]
Dickerson-Despenza's play, shadow/land received a podcast production in 2021 with The Public Theatre. [10] shadow/land is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the effects of Hurricane Katrina. [11] The second installement, [hieroglyph], was co-produced by The San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in 2021 for a digital production. [7] [12]
Dickerson-Despenza pulled Victory Gardens Theater's rights to produce cullud wattah in 2022, citing allegations of racism and oppressive values. [13] [14] In 2022, it was announced that Dickerson-Despenza would be the first resident playwright of the Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency, an initiative from the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Public Theater, and the Ntozake Shange Literary Trust. [15] [16]
shadow/land had its off-Broadway debut in 2023. [5]
Dickerson-Despenza identifies as queer and lives in New York City. [17]
Year | Award | Work | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award (Williamstown Theatre Festival) | cullud wattah | finalist | [18] |
2021 | Susan Smith Blackburn Prize | cullud wattah | Won | [19] |
2022 | Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play | cullud wattah | Nominated | |
2022 | Forward Award (Wisconsin Alumni Foundation) | n/a | Won | [1] |
2023 | PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award | n/a | Won | [20] |
Broadway theatre, or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award–winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf is a 1976 work by Ntozake Shange. It consists of a series of poetic monologues to be accompanied by dance movements and music, a form which Shange coined the word choreopoem to describe. It tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society.
Victory Gardens Theater is a theater company in Chicago, Illinois dedicated to the development and production of new plays and playwrights. The theater company was founded in 1974 when eight Chicago artists, Cecil O'Neal, Warren Casey, Stuart Gordon, Cordis Heard, Roberta Maguire, Mac McGuinnes, June Pyskaček, and David Rasche each fronted $1,000 to start a company outside the Chicago Loop and Gordon donated the light board of his Organic Theater Company. The theater's first production, The Velvet Rose, by Stacy Myatt, premiered on October 9, 1974.
Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
Tanya Barfield is an American playwright whose works have been presented both nationally and internationally.
The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize established in 1978, is the largest and oldest playwriting prize for women+ writing for English-speaking theatre. Named for Susan Smith Blackburn (1935–1977), alumna of Smith College, who died of breast cancer.
Jessica Goldberg is an American playwright, screenwriter, and television writer. In 1999, she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play, Refuge. Goldberg is the creator of the Hulu series The Path and served as the showrunner for the Netflix series Away.
Katori Hall is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, actress, and director from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Lauren Gunderson is an American playwright, screenwriter, and short story author, born in Atlanta. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches playwriting. Gunderson was recognized by American Theatre magazine as America's most produced living playwright at Theatre Communications Group member theaters in 2017, and again in 2019–20.
The PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, commonly referred to as the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award, is awarded by the PEN America. It annually recognizes two American playwrights. A medal is given to a designated "grand master" American dramatist, in recognition of their work, and a stipend of $7,500 is presented to a "new voice", an American playwright whose literary and artistic merit is evident in their plays.
Dianne McIntyre is an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her notable works include Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Dance Adventure in Southern Blues , an adaptation of Zora Neal Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as productions of why i had to dance,spell #7, and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, with text by Ntozake Shange. She has won numerous honors for her work including an Emmy nomination, three Bessie Awards, and a Helen Hayes Award. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the Dramatists Guild of America.
The Kilroys' List is a gender parity initiative to end the "systematic underrepresentation of female and trans playwrights" in the American theater industry. Gender disparity is defined as the gap of unproduced playwrights' whose plays are being discriminated against based on the writer's gender identification and intersectional identities of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, and ability. Recent statistical research released in November 2015, entitled The Count, gathered that 22% of total surveyed professional productions from 2011-2013 annual seasons were written by women playwrights, 3.8% of the total were written by women playwrights of color, and 0.4% of the total were written by foreign women playwrights of color. 78% of total surveyed professional productions were written by men playwrights.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright.
Jocelyn Bioh is a Ghanaian-American writer, playwright and actor. She graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in English and got her master's degree in Playwriting from Columbia University. Jocelyn's Broadway credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. She has performed in regional and off-Broadway productions of An Octoroon, Bootycandy and For Colored Girls. She has written many of her own plays that have been produced in national and collegiate theaters. Some of her more well-known works include Nollywood Dreams and School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. Bioh is a playwright with Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and Atlantic Theater Company, is a resident playwright at Lincoln Center and is a 2017-18 Tow Playwright-in-Residence with MCC. She is a writer on the Hulu show Tiny Beautiful Things.
Skeleton Crew is a play written by Dominique Morisseau about an auto factory on the brink of closure in 2008 Detroit, Michigan. It is the third part of Morisseau's Detroit Project, inspired by African-American playwrights, which also includes Paradise Blue and Detroit '67.
Fat Ham is a dramatic stage play written by American playwright James Ijames. It is a modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Jason Ardizzone-West is an American scenic designer, production designer, and architect. He received the 2018 Emmy Award for Outstanding Production Design for a Variety Special for Jesus Christ Superstar Live.
Mary Jane is a two-act dramatic stage play written by American playwright Amy Herzog. The play had its World Premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2017 and officially premiered on Broadway on April 23, 2024. The Broadway cast is led by Rachel McAdams in the titular role. The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play in 2018. The play is semi-autobiographical and based on Herzog's daughter Frances, who was born with nemaline myopathy and died at age 11 in 2023.
Jesse Green is the chief theatre critic for The New York Times, having started that role in 2017 as co-chief with Ben Brantley. Previously, he was the theatre critic at New York Magazine.