Oskar Eustis, Lynn Nottage & More Set to Present at the 2014 Otto Awards on 5/18

The sixteenth annual Otto René Castillo Awards for Political Theatre (executive producer, Diane Stiles) will be held on Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 2:00 p.m. at the Castillo Theatre (artistic director, Dan Friedman). Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Lynn Nottage, and others take the stage to present Otto Awards at the 16th annual awards celebration.

Honorees are:

Ping Chong + Company, founded in 1975 with the mission to create works of theater and art that explore the intersections of race, culture, history, art, media and technology in the modern world;

CollaborationTown, a company that creates original work in NYC that is relevant beyond traditional theater audiences and speaks to many of the most pressing contemporary social and political themes;

David Edgar, leading British playwright and the past president of the Writers Guild of Great Britain, known for his adaptation The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby;

Katori Hall, a playwright/performer whose writings combine often harsh and vivid realities with imaginative explorations of possibilities, her award-winning play, The Mountaintop, has received productions all over the world;

E. Patrick Johnson, a scholar/artist who has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality and performance;

Past Otto Award honorees include: Laurie Anderson, Joseph Chaikin, Kathleen Chalfant, LAByrinth Theater Company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Ntozake Shange, SITI Company, the Steppenwolf Theater, Melvin Van Peebles, Douglas Turner Ward, Robert Wilson, among many others.

"The Otto Awards are all about relationships, about creating connections, a network - a movement. The politics of 'political theatre' are not defined by ideology or in providing answers. I venture to say that we here in this room today don't have answers - and I don't think that's such a bad thing..." - Diane Stiles, Executive Producer Otto René Castillo Awards for Political Theatre

The Otto Awards were founded in 1998 to recognize, support and connect theatre companies and artists engaged in creating political, experimental and community-based theatre. They have been awarded to 92 theatres and individual theatre artists from the United States, Austria, Canada, Ecuador, France, Germany, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Pakistan, Serbia and the United Kingdom.

About the Castillo Theatre: The award-winning Castillo Theatre is the off-off-Broadway theatre of the national non-profit All Stars Project whose focus is on human development. In the past 30 years Castillo has produced over 175 productions - from avant-garde plays to musical theatre, from improvisational comedy to performance art - opening up the world of cutting-edge political theatre to people of all ages. Each year, more than 6,000 people from the diverse communities of New York City make up Castillo's audience. Castillo serves as a multi-racial home for Black theatre and since 2007 has enjoyed a producing partnership with Woodie King, Jr.'s New Federal Theatre.