Playwright Leah Nanako Winkler is adding yet another honor to her résumé. The New York Times reports that Nanako Winkler has won this year’s Yale Drama Series Prize for her latest play, “God Said This.” The award comes with $10,000, a private staged reading of the play at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater, and publication via Yale University Press.
“God Said This” competed with more than 1,600 submissions for the honor. The Kentucky-set play is about an estranged family — including a sister who returns from NYC, another sister who is a born again Christian, and a recovering alcoholic father — brought back together by the matriarch’s cancer treatment.
Nanako Winkler told The Times that she created the characters to challenge stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Kentuckians. “I wanted to sort of dismantle the myth of the submissive Asian mother as well as the tiger mom Asian mother,” she said. Speaking about the character John, a friend of one of the sisters, the playwright added, ““I really wanted to create a smart, funny, dynamic, liberal character that lives in Kentucky, because you don’t see that often.”
“I was very moved by Leah’s play about a family caught between cultures, set in the final weeks of a mother’s life,” stated playwright Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), the judge for this year’s prize. “I found it witty and wise, inhabited by a poignant specificity that conveyed me to a deeply felt sense of the universal — of the perfection of our parents’ flawed love for each other and for us; for the ways in which the approach of death can order the meaning of a human life.”
“It feels very surreal to me and I’m just really happy,” Nanako Winkler said of her win. “I wrote this in a hospital room in a quite short amount of time so I never would have thought last March when I started writing this while my mom was sleeping on the chemo drip that I would win any kind of prize or that this amazing playwright who I admire would call me and tell me the news.”
Nanako Winkler’s other plays include “Kentucky,” “Two Mile Hollow,” and “Death For Sydney Black.” She received the inaugural Mark O’Donnell Prize from The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons, is a two-time Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee, and is a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship in Creative writing.
Jacqueline Goldfinger, Barbara Seyda, and Janine Nabers are among the previous winners of the Yale Drama Series Prize.
This year’s runner-up was “Lyons Pride” by Bleu Beckford Burrell.
“God Said This” will play at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky through April 8. It will begin previews Off Broadway in January 2019.
