Playhouse On The Square Reveals NewWorks@TheWorks Winners

 

Playhouse on the Square has revealed the two winners of the 2023 NewWorks@TheWorks Playwriting Competition! These world premiere plays will be produced as a part of Playhouse on the Square's Season 56 in 2024-2025.

SIX MEN DRESSED LIKE JOSEPH STALIN

By Dianne Nora

In some forgotten corner of the Kremlin, two actors prepare for the role of a lifetime: Joseph Stalin. An imagined history based on the real lives of two of Stalin's doubles, Alexei Dikiy and Felix Dadaev.

COCO QUEENS

By LaDarrion Williams

Coco Queens is a riveting play that forms an unbroken bond between four women as they navigate their way through deep-seated, sometimes painful challenges of love, forgiveness, and Black womanhood in the 1970s.

The NewWorks@TheWorks Playwriting Competition was established in 2013 to renew Playhouse on the Square's focus on cultivating new and original theatre.  2023 saw a historic year for submissions with over 500 works entered for consideration. All scripts submitted were adjudicated by a panel of judges that consisted of the Director of New Works, Playhouse on the Square staff, Resident Company members, Mid-South writers, and directors.

Six finalists had their scripts presented as staged readings in September and October of this year. The two winners were chosen based on a variety of factors, including live audience feedback.

ABOUT THE WINNERS:

Dianne Nora (she/her) is a playwright, dramaturg, and comedy writer. She was a 2018-2019 member of Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit, where she was commissioned to write Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Living Document. She recently assisted her mentor Tracy Letts on the world premiere and Broadway productions of his play The Minutes, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In 2019, an abbreviated version of her play Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, where The Spectator named it the "Best of the Fringe." Her play for young audiences, Journey Around My Bedroom, was produced at New Ohio Theatre in 2020, and recommended by The New York Times (Top 5, Weekend Section). She's a headline and features contributor at The Onion, and her humor writing has also appeared on Funny or Die and The Hard Times where she was previously Head Writer of Breaking News. BA: New York University; MPhil: Trinity College Dublin; MFA: Columbia University School of the Arts.

Hailing from the small town of Helena, Alabama, LaDarrion Williams is a self-taught playwright, filmmaker, author, and screenwriter who aims to cultivate a new era of Black fantasy. As a playwright, his first play, Katrina, won first place at the Alabama State Thespian Conference. Black Creek Risin' was a part of the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. His play, Coco Queens, was invited to participate in the 2019 Sundance Institute's Playwriting Intensive. His plays also received semi-finalist recognition from the Eugene O'Neill National Playwriting Conference. He is a 2x finalist for the National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Playwriting Fellowship and American Blues 2023 Blue Ink Award. He is also an alum of the Echo Theatre Playwrights Lab, Studio Tenn Theatre Company New Works Series, TSU's Black and Latino Playwrights Festival, and the Boise Contemporary Theater BIPOC Playwrights Festival. His Jeff Award-nominated play Boulevard of Bold Dreams (a story about Hattie McDaniel's historic Oscar win) was a part of the New Works Festival at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica, California. It had a world premiere production at the TimeLine Theatre Company in Chicago and an East Coast Premiere at Greater Boston Stage Company in March 2023. It will be a part of the Orlando Shakes Theater Signature Series in Fall 2023 and will be produced at subsequent theaters nationwide in 2024-2025. In his filmmaking bag, LaDarrion has curated three short films on YouTube. As a debut author, his Young Adult Blood at the Root was acquired in a competitive auction from Labyrinth Road, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and will debut in the Summer of 2024.

 

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