22-Year-Old Max Yu Wins $45,000 Relentless Award For Playwriting

According to The New York Times, Max Yu has won the Relentless Award, a $45,000 reward from the American Playwriting Foundation, granted to one playwright a year for work that has not yet been produced.

Yu's work, Nightwatch, won the award. He is the first Chinese-American awardee.

"Part of me is like, I don't deserve to win this award," Yu said. "Because I'm 22. I'm way too young. I'm like a nobody."

Nightwatch is a semi-autobiographical story about a Chinese-American boy who, after his father's death, explores his role in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It deals with the topic of personal loss and experiments with language.

Yu's parents immigrated to Queens in the 1980s, and grew up in the San Francisco area, where the main character in the play is from. To conduct research for his play, Yu traveled to China for a summer and visited the factory where his father worked.

About 10 percent of the play is written in Chinese, using Chinese characters instead of English transliteration. Although Yu says he knew this was a risk, it was important to him to reflect exactly what his father, grandmother, and other family members saw, he said.

In addition to Yu, there were two other finalists for the awad, including Mia Chung with "This Exquisite Corpse" and John J. Caswell Jr. with "Wet Brain." They each received $1,500.

Read more on The New York Times.

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