Pittsburgh Public Theater Declares Winner of 2022 New Play Contest

Pittsburgh Public Theater has announced the winner of the organization's 2021-2022 New Play Contest, Lisa Langford, for her play The Breakfast at the Bookstore. As the winning playwright, Ms. Langford will receive a $500 honorarium and a staged reading of her script will be featured in this season's Public PlayTime series.

The Public launched its inaugural New Play Contest in the fall of 2020 and began accepting submissions for the second iteration this past October. Nearly 100 scripts from playwrights based in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or West Virginia were submitted for consideration, doubling the number of entries from the 2020-2021 contest. The full text of each play was adjudicated by a cohort of local readers over the course of three rounds. The criteria for evaluation included use of theme, effectiveness of plot structure, clarity of playwright's perspective, character development, as well as overall impact of the work. The Pittsburgh Public Theater Playwrights Collective comprised the final panel of readers and ultimately decided the Contest's winner.

New Play Contest Finalists

Alex Dremann for The Pear-Shaped Man Fights Crime
Matt Pelfrey for The Alligator Gospels

About the Winning Playwright

Lisa Langford is a Cleveland-based playwright and actor. She is a member of Dobama Theatre's Playwrights Gym. She received her B.A. in History from Harvard University and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Cleveland State University. Her play Rastus and Hattie was a Joyce Award winner (w/ Cleveland Public Theatre); a Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference finalist; and a The Kilroy's List honorable mention. The play was published by New Stage Press. Lisa's other plays include How Blood Go, which was an August Wilson New Play Initiative reading series selection at Chicago's Congo Square Theatre and part of Global Black Voices at the Roundhouse Theatre in London UK; The Art of Longing, a Leslie Scalapino Award finalist for Innovative Women Playwrights; and two short plays, The Bomb, published in the anthology Black Lives/Black Words, and Revolt. Ing, which was part of the I Am...Festival at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago. She has received commissions from the Cleveland Playhouse, the College of Wooster and others. A recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, Lisa is a member of the Dramatist Guild and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.

About the Winning Play

Five years after the 1968 Glenville Uprising in Cleveland, Ohio, aspiring activist Dot wants to open a bookstore that is both a sanctuary for her community and a monument to the tenets of the Black liberation movement. Sharpe, Dot's common-law husband and a former Black nationalist, wants anything but. Their moral and generational struggle has unexpected extraterrestrial implications from popping toasters to poignant premonitions in Lisa Langford's thought-provoking, genre-bending play.

Previously, The Breakfast at the Bookstore received a reading at the Panndora Productions New Play Festival in Long Beach, CA in November 2021 and was awarded a development grant from the Miranda Theatre Company in NYC.

For further inquiries about the New Play Contest, please send a message to PlayTime@PPT.org.

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