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The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama

Finalist: The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe

For a timely play about a girls’ high school soccer team that illuminates with the unmistakable ping of reality the way young selves are formed when innate character clashes with external challenges.

Nominated Work

The Wolves

By

Sarah DeLappe

Left quad. Right quad. Lunge. A girls indoor soccer team warms up. From the safety of their suburban stretch circle, the team navigates big questions and wages tiny battles with all the vim and vigor of a pack of adolescent warriors. A portrait of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for nine American girls who just want to score some goals.

-- from the New Play Exchange's website

Biography

Sarah DeLappe's play The Wolves premiered Off-Broadway at The Playwrights Realm, following an engagement at New York Stage and Film, and development at Clubbed Thumb and Great Plains Theatre Conference. The Wolves received the American Playwriting Foundation's inaugural Relentless Award, and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Yale Drama Series Prize. DeLappe is the Page One Playwright for The Playwrights Realm and has been a resident artist at the Sitka Fellows Program and SPACE on Ryder Farm. Past affiliations: Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers' Group, New Georges Audrey Residency. Current: Ars Nova's Play Group, Resident Playwright at LCT3. MFA in process at Brooklyn College.

Winners

Prize Winner in Drama in 2017:

Lynn Nottage

For a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream. Drama

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2017:

Taylor Mac

For an inspired bardic creation that involves the audience in a marathon musical journey that challenges the persistent societal demons of racism, sexism and homophobia.

The Jury

Elysa Gardner(Chair)

Entertainment Critic

Annie Baker*

playwright

Jesse Green

Theater Critic and Contributing Editor

Jonathan Kalb

Professor of Theatre

Wendy Rosenfield

Theater Critic

Winners in Drama

2016

Lin-Manuel Miranda

A landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.
2015

Stephen Adly Guirgis

A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
2014

Annie Baker

A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
2013

Ayad Akhtar

A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
See All Drama

2017 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
Commentary

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.
Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
Editorial Writing

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.
See All 2017 Winners