2024 IDEA AWARDS FOR THEATRE Recipients Announced

The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation has announced the recipients of their 2024 Idea Awards for Theatre; three categories of grants awarded to adventurous new voices in playwriting and musical theatre, as well the visionary playwrights who have inspired and blazed trails before them.

The 2024 Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award will be presented to Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, La Bamba). Honoring accomplished playwrights who have created significant, idea-driven works throughout their career, the Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award is given with a $25,000 prize for the recipient.

Daria Miyeko Marinelli is the recipient of this year’s Ollie New Play Award. Two Vivace Musical Theatre Awards will be presented; one to AG, MILCK, and Sam Chanse; and another to Dan Fishback. Recognizing emerging talent and original work with ambitious theatrical ideas, both awards are bestowed to each recipient with a $25,000 prize.

Each of the six artists will also receive a unique stone statuette hand-carved by Bruce Ostler.

The 2024 Idea Awards for Theatre will be presented on Friday, November 15, 2024, in a private ceremony (by invitation only) at The Players (16 Gramercy Park South, NYC). Entertainment will feature live performances by this year's Vivace Musical Theatre Award winners.

Theatrical Agent Bret Adams and his partner Dr. Paul Reisch loved the theatre with great passion. As a theatrical agent, Bret shepherded the careers of many actors, writers and directors and designers, including Phylicia Rashad, Judy Kaye, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Sherman Hemsley, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Eve Arden, Christine Ebersole, Kathleen Marshall, Jane Wyman, André De Shields, Kathy Bates, Susan H. Schulman, Jack Heifner, Philip McKinley and Robert Harling, among many others. After Bret and Paul’s passing, in 2006 and 2015 respectively, their eponymous foundation was created at their bequest. The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation champions visionary theatre writers in their creation of expansive, illuminating, and idea-driven theatre. Embracing diversity in all its forms, The Foundation encourages artists with fresh perspectives - particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds - to create idea-driven new plays and musicals reflecting on multivalent themes. Nominations for all three awards are accepted exclusively from The Foundation’s Board of Artistic Advisors. For more information, visit www.BretnPaulFoundation.org.

"The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation created the ‘Idea Awards for Theatre’ to encourage expansive, idea-driven artworks with inherently theatrical ways of illuminating big ideas and concepts,” says Bruce Ostler, V.P. and Board Member of The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation. “With our grants, we hope to give ambitious writers the needed time and space to explore big, complex ideas. These plays take a community to build, so we are also partnering with theatre companies and producers to further develop our awarded projects, and get these pieces out to audiences. We are proud to present the Ollie Award for the most ambitious new play by an emerging playwright, two Vivace Awards for big-idea new musicals, and the Tooth of Time Award to honor artists who have a substantial and important career of idea-driven theatrical works.”

"Luis Valdez is a titan upon whose back the Chicano theatre movement stands. He has created work over six decades, as a solo artist and with his company El Teatro Campesino, that has engaged movements and inspired generations of artists after him," says Kate Bussert, Executive Director of the BAPR Foundation. "Our musical theatre winners this year are each using the form to grapple with big societal issues in a theatrical way. Dan Fishback is telling his story of living with ME/CFS with his new musical Dan Fishback Is Alive, Unwell, And Living In His Apartment, and is transforming his illness and isolation into a radically welcoming, care-full rock concert that will use theatrical tools in new ways to make the event accessible and beautiful. And the team of AG, MILCK, and Sam Chanse are creating The Family Album, which will follow a Chinese-American survivor of sexual assault as she breaks through cultural taboos and family pressure to stay silent. And finally, our new play winner Daria Miyeko Marinelli is dreaming up an immersive piece that will weave together three family lineages over a century of time, interrogating the legacies and mythologies we inherit from our ancestors. Each of these six artists is so deserving, and we are thrilled to welcome them into our community."

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