Essential Theatre Reveals 2024 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award winner

Essential Theatre has announced the 2024 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award winner, Emily McClain, for her script The Rock & The Hard Place. Her play will receive a full production in the 2024 Essential Theatre Festival this summer as well as a $1,000 cash prize. Started in 2001, the Essential Theatre Playwriting Competition is the only competition of its kind. The 2024 Award is sponsored by Could Be Pretty Cool, the Playwriting Award Sponsor since 2021. McClain will be honored at Essential Theatre's Celebration of Georgia Playwrights event in April, and all who support the arts in Georgia are invited to attend.  

This is McClain's second Essential Theatre Playwriting Award, the first being for her very first full-length play, Slaying Holofernes, which was co-winner of the 2019 Essential Theatre Playwriting Award and received its world premiere production in the 2019 Essential Theatre Play Festival. 

"After the amazing experience that I had in 2019 when Essential produced Slaying Holofernes, I feel very confident that my play will be in great hands having its world premiere with Essential. I appreciate the quality of artists and theatre makers that Essential brings into their productions too because they are always people who value high-quality art and storytelling. Additionally, The Rock & The Hard Place is set in Georgia and addresses topics that are important conversations for audiences to have, and I think that Essential has the community-minded focus to tap into and guide those conversations," said McClain of winning the 2024 Playwriting Award.

"I consider the playwriting contest to be one of the most important parts of our artistic ecosystem here in Georgia," concludes McClain. "I encourage all Georgia playwrights to submit, because developing new work is the lifeblood of this art form."

About Emily McClain

Emily McClain is a professional playwright, theatre educator and a member of WriteStuffATL and the Dramatists Guild. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, she currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia where she teaches theatre at School of the Arts @ Central Gwinnett. 

Since her first production with Essential in 2019, she has become quite prolific and accomplished, with later plays being produced and earning accolades locally, nationally and abroad, from a Synchronicity Theatre Stripped Bare grant here in Atlanta to the Risk Theatre International Competition and the William Faulkner Literary Prize. 

About The Rock & The Hard Place

This play follows Elsie Tully as she is driven to extreme lengths in her attempts to exonerate her father, who is on Death Row, condemned to be executed for a crime she’s sure he didn’t commit. The play began as a single scene commissioned for the Courtroom Drama Series at Actor’s Express, a series that addresses ethical questions as part of lawyers' continuing education accreditation. "The idea that attorney-client privilege exists even after the death of the client, and even when sharing information could free an innocent man (as was the case in the circumstances that inspired this play), is a thorny ethical dilemma I wanted the audience of lawyers at the Courtroom Drama Series to wrestle with," shares McClain. "Currently, twenty-seven states maintain Death Row and execute people in this country, and the majority of those are in the South, so this is an issue that we must grapple with more intensely than in other parts of the country...I hope that this story will prompt audience conversation about the death penalty, the difficulty in exonerating innocent people, and the responsibility we have as a society to build a system of true restorative justice."