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For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

The Flick, by 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.
Lee Bollinger and Annie Baker

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University, presents the 2014 Drama Prize to Annie Baker.

Winning Work

The Flick

Scene from The Flick

 

Directed by Sam Gold
February 15, 2013 – April 07, 2013
Mainstage Theater, Playwrights Horizon, New York, NY

In a run-down movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees mop the floors and attend to one of the last 35 millimeter film projectors in the state. Their tiny battles and not-so-tiny heartbreaks play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen. With keen insight and a finely-tuned comic eye, The Flick is a hilarious and heart-rending cry for authenticity in a fast-changing world.

-- Playwrights Horizon

Biography

Annie Baker’s (Playwright) full-length plays include Circle Mirror Transformation (Playwrights Horizons, Obie Award for Best New American Play, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Aliens (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Obie Award for Best New American Play), and Body Awareness (Atlantic Theater Company, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play/Emerging Playwright). Her plays have been produced regionally at South Coast Rep, the Guthrie, Victory Gardens, Artists Rep, Huntington Theater Company, Seattle Rep, Studio Theatre in DC, Hyde Park Theatre and the San Francisco Playhouse, and produced internationally in England, Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Latvia and Russia. Annie is a member of New Dramatists, the MCC Playwrights Coalition and she is a Residency Five Playwright at the new Signature Theatre. Recent honors include a United States Artists Collins Fellowship, New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Lilly Award, a Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship and a Master Artist Residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. An anthology of her work, The Vermont Plays, has been published by TCG, and her adaptation of Uncle Vanya had its World Premiere at Soho Rep in June 2012.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2014:

Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori

A poignant musical adaptation of a graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, exploring sexual identity amid complicated family constraints and relationships.

Madeleine George

A cleverly constructed play that uses several historical moments – from the 1800s to the 2010s – to meditate on the technological advancements that bring people together and tear them apart.

The Jury

Jill Dolan(Chair )

professor

David Auburn*

playwright

Karen D'Souza

theater critic

Dominic P. Papatola

theater critic

Alexis Soloski

drama critic

Winners in Drama

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.

Quiara Alegría Hudes

An imaginative play about the search for meaning by a returning Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop in his hometown of Philadelphia.

Bruce Norris

For "Clybourne Park," a powerful work whose memorable characters speak in witty and perceptive ways to America's sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.

Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey

A powerful rock musical that grapples with mental illness in a suburban family and expands the scope of subject matter for musicals.

2014 Prize Winners

Donna Tartt

A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.

Alan Taylor

A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.

Megan Marshall

A richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women's rights who died in a shipwreck.

Vijay Seshadri

A compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.