Annette Bening, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, and theater director Leigh Silverman (“Violet”) are working with audiobook company Audible to support new playwrights. According to the New York Times, Audible is spearheading a $5 million fund “to commission new works from emerging playwrights — not for the stage, but for people’s headphones and speakers.” Grant recipients will pen one- or two-person audio plays, which will be available via Audible later in 2017.
Audible grants are available “to cover both ‘industry standards’ for new commissions and the cost of production,” the Times details.
Bening, Nottage, and Silverman will serve on the grant advisory board alongside Labyrinth Theater Company artistic director Mimi O’Donnell, Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis, playwrights Tom Stoppard and David Henry Hwang, and director Trip Cullman. Together, the board members will “draw from the vast pool of young writers” and recommend a dozen honorees.
“I’m hoping that people just come out of the woodwork,” Donald R. Katz, Audible’s chief executive, told the Times. Katz is also hopeful that the grants will help playwrights reach new audiences. “To celebrate live performance in the theater is one thing, but think of professional sports,” he explained, referring to sports’ TV broadcasts. “There’s the game, but it’s also being projected to millions of other people in a really powerful way.”
For her part, Silverman is excited that fresh creative voices will receive financial support while they work. “They’re actually getting paid to write a play. That’s a rare thing, and it’s an important thing,” she commented.
Bening earned rave reviews as Dorothea Fields, a single mother trying to raise her son to be a decent person, in “20th Century Women.” You can catch her next in a film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” and in Season 2 of “American Crime Story.” She’ll portray Kathleen Blanco, Louisiana’s governor during Hurricane Katrina, in the latter.
Nottage is the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice. She won this year for “Sweat,” a play about factory workers facing layoffs, and in 2009 for “Ruined,” which focuses on “ruined” women — rape survivors and sex workers — in civil war-torn Congo. Her other works include “Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” “Fabulation,” “Intimate Apparel,” and “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.”
