Yale University Press
Yale Drama Series
In this love letter to queer bathhouse culture, the Presenter, a Mexican-American public-speaking student, is thrust into the landscapes of queer intimacy, colonialism, and erotic community when their class presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing starts to unravel. What had been a single presentation soon becomes a chorus, joining student presenters with the ghosts of bathhouses past, present, and future, along with the cleaning staff, A Conquistador!, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control, to explore queer desire and the gleeful delights of messiness. Here in the bathhouse at the end of the world, Jesús I. Valles conjures the ever-present yearning for skin to touch skin, a place of connection that shimmers in the steam of the bathhouse and refuses to ever fully fade.
Bathhouse.pptx is the sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and first winner chosen by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris.
In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier?
Jar of Fat, the fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, is a phantasmagorical, absurdist Korean American tale about the allure and danger entangled within the quest for beauty and thinness. Both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply troubling, Seayoung Yim’s play burns through the accumulated rage that anti-fat bias produces to reclaim what it steals from us every day: grace, space, possibility, and breath.
Set in Kentucky, this compelling drama centers around a Japanese-American family reunited as their matriarch
undergoes cancer treatment. The father, James, is a recovering alcoholic seeking redemption, and the two
daughters are struggling to overcome their differences—Sophie is an ardent born-again Christian, while Hiro
lives a single’s life in New York City. John, an old high school classmate of Hiro’s who is now a single dad, worries about leaving a legacy for his son. Wry and bittersweet, God Said This vividly captures the complexities of a familial reconciliation in the throes of crisis and looks deeply at the meaning of family—Japanese, Southern, and otherwise.
This is the first Yale Drama Series winner chosen by Pulitzer prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, who
describes the play as conveying “a deeply felt sense of the universal—of the perfection of our parents’ flawed
love for each other and for us; for the ways in which the approach of death can order the meaning of a human life.”
Set in a bar in the Florida Everglades, this biting, brutally funny multigenerational family drama concerns a Gulf Coast couple, their disabled young ward, two lesbian tenants, and the bonds that bind them all together. The eleventh winner of the Yale Drama Series playwriting competition, it is a powerful story born out of the playwright’s own experiences with the rapidly changing social environment of rural Florida, where long-standing traditions and beliefs can collide, sometimes dangerously, with new ideas of personhood, identity, and self-realization. A rich and colorful mélange of American classes and cultures, Bottle Fly recounts a profoundly human struggle to reconcile the masks worn at home with the ones donned to go out into the world.
The winner of the 2015 Yale Drama Series playwriting competition was selected by Nicholas Wright, former Associate Director of London’s Royal Court. Barbara Seyda’s stunningly theatrical Celia, a Slave is a vivid tableau of interviews with the dead that interweaves oral histories with official archival records. Powerful, poetic, and stylistically bold, this work foregrounds twenty-three diverse characters to recall the events that led to the hanging of nineteen-year-old Celia, an African American slave convicted in a Missouri court of murdering her master, the prosperous landowner Robert Newsom, in 1855. Excavating actual trial transcripts and court records, Seyda bears witness to racial and sexual violence in U.S. history, illuminating the brutal realities of female slave life in the pre–Civil War South while exploring the intersection of rape, morality, economics, and gender politics that continue to resonate today.
“The play does not have a tragic ending, though you will be certain that it must. But it is a tragic story. It is the tragedy of lives lived without hope of deliverance. . . . I will leave you to read the play and determine how on earth we get to a satisfying ending to this tragic tale of a woman without a chance. But that ending is the genius of Nabers’s work, her faith in the ability of people with no chance, to find one.”—Marsha Norman, from the Foreword
The year is 1979 and a serial killer in Atlanta is abducting and murdering young black children. Against a backdrop of fear and uncertainty, playwright Janine Nabers explores the emotional battleground where an African-American single mother wars with her teenage daughter, each coping in her own way with personal tragedy and loss. The volatility of their situation is intensified when a severely damaged and devastatingly handsome stranger becomes an integral part of their lives.
Serial Black Face is the eighth winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Marsha Norman. At once startling, engrossing, suspenseful, and exhilarating, Nabers’s powerful drama employs a real-life nightmare, the Atlanta Child Murders of the late 1970s, to incisively examine human frailty and the prickly complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. A stunning theatrical work, both thoughtful and profoundly moving, Serial Black Face is richly deserving of this year’s prize.
In this darkly comic exploration of loss, intimacy, and motherhood, three women are joined by a baby who never lived. Morgan, in her middle years, is the grieving mother of a stillborn child. Elena, the failed midwife, burdened by guilt, is considering a career change. Dolores, eighteen, is pregnant with a baby she does not want. Meanwhile, Constantinople, the child who wasn’t meant to be, wanders lost in search of his mother, trying to make sense of the world while making an unlikely appearance in each woman’s personal drama.
Poignant, lyrical, ingeniously absurd, and outrageously funny, Jen Silverman’s Still is a brave and remarkable exploration of grief and family. It is the seventh winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, selected this year by Marsha Norman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Getting Out; ’night, Mother; and other acclaimed theatrical works.
When he was twelve, Joe snuck into the field on the edge of town and saw the Town Mayor with his sister Peregrine. This one moment has overwhelmed and transformed his life, becoming the only thing that holds any importance to him. Years later, in jail for murder, Joe waits for Peregrine so that he can explain his plan for her future, a plan so intricately assembled that he has given it a name—New Light Shine.
Four characters in Shannon Murdoch's bold new play are trapped in an argument of memory that threatens to turn perception into truth. Their task is to dig through years of silence and half-truths to arrive at a future that may at last bring peace. In the ensuing struggles, disturbing questions arise—about female and child sexuality as well as the responsibilities of government and community in raising children.
Selecting Murdoch's New Light Shine from more than 800 submissions that arrived from the far reaches of the English-speaking world, contest judge John Guare praises the distinct voice of this play and its challenging subject. "I read it, put it aside, went back to it, couldn't get it out of my head," he recollects. "This raw, haunting, richly poetic, deeply emotional play affected me as no other entry did."
Memory, history, and culture collide with the starlit rooftop dreams of a myth-inspired character as Soledad and her partner, Hailstorm, redefine family on their own terms after the death of their eldest son in Iraq. blu, steeped in poetic realism and contemporary politics, challenges us to try to imagine a time before war.
Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, Virginia Grise's play blu takes place in the present but looks back on the not too distant past through a series of prayers, rituals, and dreams. Contest judge David Hare commented, "Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you've read it." Noting that 2010 was a banner year for women playwrights, he added, "Women's writing for the theatre is stronger and more eloquent than it has ever been."
It’s been fifteen years since Guantánamo, fifteen years since Bashir last saw his U.S. Army interrogator, Alice. Bashir is now dying of a disease of the liver, an organ that he believes is the home of the soul. He tracks down Alice in Texas and demands that she donate half her liver as restitution for the damage wrought during her interrogations.
But Alice doesn’t remember Bashir; a PTSD pill trial she participated in while in the army has left her without any memory of her time there. It is only when her inquisitive fourteen-year-old daughter begins her own investigation that the fragile peace of mind that Alice’s drug-induced oblivion enabled begins to falter.
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s powerful drama asks important and difficult questions: Is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning, or is it an obstacle to be overcome? Will the price of our national political amnesia be paid only by the next generation—the daughters and sons who were never there?
Upon awarding the prize, David Hare wrote, “We admired the play because—although it was stylishly written, although the governing metaphor and basic realism were held in a fine balance—it also recalled the political urgency which had propelled a previous generation of writers into the theatre in the first place.”
Neil Wechsler’s Grenadine has been chosen as the second winner of the Yale Drama Series. The play was selected by Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright and contest judge Edward Albee. Grenadine is the fantastical story of a man’s quest for love in the company of three devoted friends. Albee writes, I found it highly original. . . . The questions the play asks and the answers it proposes are provocative; the play stretched my mind.”
About the Yale Drama Series
Yale University Press, the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the David Charles Horn Foundation are proud co-sponsors of this major competition to support emerging playwrights. Each year’s winner receives the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of the manuscript by Yale University Press, and a staged reading at Yale Repertory Theatre. For more information and complete rules for the Yale Drama Series, visit yalebooks.com.
John Connolly’s The Boys from Siam has been chosen as the first winner of the Yale Drama Series. This play was selected by playwright and contest judge Edward Albee, winner of the Pulitzer prize. Based loosely on the lives of nineteenth-century brothers Chang and Eng Bunker (the source of the term Siamese twins”), The Boys from Siam is the haunting and lyrical story of conjoined twins Pigg and Pegg. In his foreword, Edward Albee writes that the work is a beautifully realized concentrated universe. It takes big chances along the way . . . and makes us carereally care.”
For more information and complete rules for the Yale Drama Series, visit yalebooks.com
