SoHo Playhouse Announces 2024 IFES Overall Excellence Award Winner

From around the world, the top festival shows unite at SoHo Playhouse in its annual International Fringe Encore Series. They bring with them their stories and voices, they are the best of the fest. Amongst those select few, one show is chosen to present their story as a full Off-Broadway run.

SoHo Playhouse has announced Jiggs Burgess' Wounded as the winner of its 2024 International Fringe Encore Series Overall Excellence Award. Directed by Del Shores, the cast included Shaw Jones and Craig Taggart, and was produced by Emerson Collins and Beard Collins Shores Productions. The play's Off-Broadway run will take place in 2025. Exact dates to be announced at a later date.

SoHo Playhouse's Artistic Director Darren Lee Cole says, "In a festival comprised of the top award-winning shows from fringe festivals around the world, Wounded has distinguished itself as the year's outstanding production. A sharp piece of new dramatic writing with a big twist, it left me and audiences on the edges of our seats. We look forward with great enthusiasm for Jiggs & Co. continuing the journey and joining SoHo Playhouse as part of our 2025 season."

Playwright Jiggs Burgess says, "The original opportunity to work with Darren Lee Cole and the incredible crew at SoHo Playhouse during the 2024 Fringe Encore Series was a dream come true, but being honored with the Overall Excellence Award is beyond what we could have even imagined. I don't have the words to say how incredibly humbled we are that Wounded has been granted this singular distinction from an international group of extraordinary work. As my dear, sainted grandmama would say... I just might squeeter myself."

Director Del Shores adds, "What a journey it has been with Wounded, working with all the supportive, creative folks at SoHo Playhouse on this amazing Jiggs Burgess play, directing two brilliant actors, Craig Taggart and Shaw Jones. On behalf of my producing partners Emerson Collins and Louise H. Beard, the Overall Excellence Award, along with the opportunity for a full run of this important play, is accepted with deep gratitude."

In Wounded, writer Jiggs Burgess tells us the story of a repressed nobody who thinks of himself as somebody, an addict, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf played out between hummingbirds, and a cat eating dog. Following former childhood friends Carrol and Robert as their personal circumstances have led them down two very different paths, director Del Shores brings to the stage the notion that "in the darkest of comedies, the bleak paths our lives can lead us down are on full display." Winner of the Pick of the Hollywood Fringe, Best of Broadwater Theatre and Hollywood Encore Producers' Awards.

Continuing in the spirit of the theater's original tenant, Edward Albee and his Playwright Unit Workshop, SoHo Playhouse is committed to presenting the brightest and most talented artists from New York, with its Lighthouse Series, and around the world, with the International Fringe Encore Series, to give the theater-going audience of New York important stories told with unique style, and evolving what the concept of Off-Broadway Theater is in the 21st century. SoHo Playhouse is located at 15 Vandam Street in New York City. For info visit https://www.sohoplayhouse.com.

Photo Credit: Mat Hayes

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