Philip Gerson Named Stanley Drama Award Winner

 The Wagner College Theatre has named Philip Gerson the winner of the 2011 Stanley Drama Award for his play, "Eyes Forward." Gerson makes his home in both New York and Los Angeles.
      
Two finalists in the 2011 competition were also announced: Carl L. Williams of Houston, Texas for "A Woman on the Cusp," and Paul Hoan Zeidler of Los Angeles for "NudeNaked."
      
This year's award ceremony will be held on Monday, March 14, at 6 p.m. at The Players Club in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, New York.

The Stanley Drama Award was established in 1957 by Staten Island philanthropist Alma Guyon Timolat Stanley and endowed through the Stanley-Timolat Foundation. The national Stanley Award competition is administered by the Theater Department of Wagner College.
      
The Stanley Drama Award has a long and distinguished history. Past winners include Terrence McNally's "This Side of the Door" (aka "Things That Go Bump in the Night"), Lonne Elder III's "Ceremonies in Dark Old Men," and Jonathan Larson's "Rent." Among those judging for the Stanley Award have been playwrights Edward Albee and Paul Zindel, actresses Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley, and TV producer/pioneer talk-show host David Susskind.
      
For more information about the Stanley Drama Award program, call Betty McComiskey at 718-420-4014, or e-mail her at emccomis@wagner.edu.

2011 AWARD WINNER: "EYES FORWARD," BY Philip Gerson. A valuable painting stolen by the Nazis during WWII forms the background for two extraordinary love stories -- seven decades apart -- in "Eyes Forward."
      
When Samuel takes his widowed father Otto to Germany to try to claim a portrait of Otto's mother, the young American finds himself unwillingly drawn to Wilda, who was given the painting by her beloved grandfather. Samuel is also pulled into a powerful mystery: Did Wilda's grandfather actually purchase the painting from Otto's parents, or was the sale forced by the Nazis? What was the fate of the painting's artist, who disappeared in the Holocaust? And what is the truth behind the life-long love affair between the artist and the subject of his portrait, Samuel's grandmother? As Samuel struggles to discover the answers to these and other questions, he begins to wonder if they lie locked in the memory of the now elderly Otto, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease -- or is Otto simply unwilling to remember what really happened all those years ago?
      
"Eyes Forward" is about the need for human connection in the present, and to the past. It is a story of love and reconciliation, and of the healing power of art.

Philip Gerson writes for the stage, television and film. His Stanley Award-winning play "Eyes Forward" has received staged readings at the Berkshire Playwrights Lab in Great Barrington, Mass., the Road Theatre in Los Angeles and The Actors Studio New York; another reading is scheduled for the Amphibian Theatre in Ft. Worth, Texas in April. Another play, "This Isn't What it Looks Like," last year had workshops at the Gallery Players in Brooklyn and the Telluride Playwrights Festival in Colorado. His newest play, "The Last Laugh," a farce about the French playwright Georges Feydeau, just had its first reading at the Lark in New York.
      
Other work by Philip Gerson written for the stage includes the plays "Jumping Blind" (N.Y. Gayfest), "Night" (N.Y. International Fringe Festival), the book for the musical, "The Last Metro," based on the Francois Truffaut film (Musical Theatre Works in New York; Colony Theatre in Los Angeles), and the books for the musical parodies "Fiddler on the West Hollywood Roof" and "West Hollywood Gypsy," which were produced by Charity Parody Productions in Los Angeles to benefit AIDS charities with the permission of the original authors.
      
Gerson's extensive television work includes two of the most popular series in TV history: "Murder, She Wrote" (for which he was story editor), and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" (for which he was executive co-producer). Other series for which he has written include "Cover Me" (for which he also served as executive co-producer); "Legacy" (executive co-producer); "Christy" (executive story editor); "Columbo," and "Mysterious Ways." He wrote the TV movie, "A change of Seasons," as well as screenplays for several studios and pilots for several networks. His original pilot, "R & D," was published by the Writers' Guild of America's "Written By" magazine as one of the six Best Unproduced Sci-Fi Scripts.
      
Gerson is the recipient of the Film Advisory Board Award, the Prism Award from the Entertainment Industry Council, and the Dialogue Award from the Institute for Mental Health.

FINALIST: "A WOMAN ON THE CUSP," BY CARL L. Williams. A mentally unstable woman, tormented by a childhood trauma, attempts to write her memoirs at her brother's insistence as a form of therapy. But the ghost writer brought in to help her is actually a psychiatrist, hired to certify her as insane so her brother can have her committed to a mental institution and gain control of their dying father's financial empire. The brother calls in a family friend to reinforce his accusations of insanity, but the friend's allegiances are unclear. The psychiatrist faces an ethical dilemma as he tries to discover the nature of the woman's trauma while holding off her brother's impatient demands that he finish the job.

CARL L. Williams is a Houston, Texas playwright who has had 30 full-length and one-act plays produced since 1998, often as the result of winning competitions. One of those earlier plays, "Under a Cowboy Moon," was a Stanley Drama Award competition finalist in 2004; it was later produced Off Off Broadway at the Lodestar Theatre in 2007. Williams is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

FINALIST: "NUDE NAKED," BY PAUL HOAN ZEIDLER. Bennett Duquesne, a controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, arrives home late and discovers one of his graduate students has been shot and seriously wounded in his living room. The police have taken his daughter, Addy, in for questioning. Addy's boyfriend, a disreputable trust-fund baby, fired the gun, but Addy refuses to give a statement about the events of that evening. The men had been arguing over the origin of a Duquesne photograph that Addy had modeled for in her teens.
      
Addy is Duquesne's creative partner, artistic confidant and his muse; although she's now 23, she's been modeling nude in his photos since she was six. They've used the events of their lives to inspire his photography for so long that neither understands how unique, fragile and entangling their relationship is. And, over the course of the play, they begin creating photos that investigate fear, pain, guilt and guns.
      
A media hurricane thunders to life around them, but Duquesne ignores it, putting his faith in his artistic reputation and the quality of his work. As their lives and the photos spin into a destructive cause célèbre, their attorney suggests Duquesne and Addy agree to an interview with an influential arts and culture magazine. Duquesne relents, believing it will force the media to respect his artistic bona fides and drop their obsessive coverage. But Harper's, Esquire and 60 Minutes are no longer the major institutions on this cultural landscape -- Drudge Report, TMZ and E! are.

PAUL HOAN ZEIDLER is the pen name of Paul Michels, who realized he needed a pen name when someone else named Paul Michels already had scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America, and the L.A. County Coroner asked him to come downtown to pick up The Remains of the deceased. A Milwaukee native, Zeidler moved out to Los Angeles to attend graduate school at the University of Southern California. He graduated from the USC Professional Writing Program, where he studied with Hubert Selby Jr. ("Last Exit to Brooklyn"), John Rechy ("City of Night"), Paul Zindel ("The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds") and Jerome Lawrence ("Inherit the Wind"). Zeidler remembers Lawrence preaching something he called the Eleventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not commit television on a theater stage," which he has taken to heart ever since. Zeidler directed his previous full-length play, "Time's Scream and Hurry," in two Los Angeles productions in 2008 before taking it to the New York International Fringe Festival a couple of years ago for a successful run at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Los Angeles stagings of his shorter works include "The Enchanter Disappears," with the Jerome Lawrence Quintet, and "Your Mind Breathes Water," with the Elephant Theatre Company. Zeidler is currently working on two new plays, "Woof-Woof" and "(Bounce) Like You Want It," and trying to decide if another piece, "Jericho," is a play or a novel. Zeidler is the founder and artistic director of Sewer Socialist Productions.