Skip to main content
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury

A hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors’ community to face deep-seated prejudices.

Jackie Sibblies Drury accepts the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Fairview

Official trailer.

The Frasier family is gearing up for Grandma’s birthday, and Beverly needs this dinner to be perfect. But the silverware’s wrong, the radio’s on the fritz, Jasmine is drinking, Dayton isn’t helping, Keisha’s a teenager, and Tyrone might not show up at all!

Following her “inventive,” “pulse-pounding” We Are Proud to Present… (The New York Times, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine Critics’ Picks), Jackie Sibblies Drury and director Sarah Benson show us that nothing’s funnier than “family drama.”

-- from Soho Rep. website

Biography

Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her critically acclaimed play Fairview premiered this past summer at Soho Rep. Other plays include We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, Really, and Social Creatures. Drury's plays have been presented by New York City Players and Abrons Arts Center, Soho Rep, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Company One, and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at The Bellagio Center, Sundance, The Ground Floor, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, A.C.T., The Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, NYTW, PRELUDE, The Bushwick Starr, and The MacDowell Colony. Drury is a NYTW Usual Suspect, a United States Artists Gracie Fellow, has received a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, and is a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2019:

Clare Barron

A refreshingly unorthodox play that conveys the joy and abandon of dancing, while addressing the changes to body and mind of its preteen characters as they peer over the precipice toward adulthood.

Heidi Schreck

A charming and incisive analysis of gender and racial biases inherent to the U.S. Constitution that examines how this living document could evolve to fit modern America.

The Jury

Misha Berson(Chair)

theater critic, teacher, author and lecturer, Seattle, Wa.

Gina Gionfriddo

playwright, New York, N.Y.

Henry D. Godinez

Professor of Theatre, Northwestern University; resident artistic associate, Goodman Theatre

Wendy C. Goldberg

Artistic Director, National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center

Peter Marks

chief theater critic

Winners in Drama

Martyna Majok

An honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection through two pairs of mismatched individuals: a former trucker and his recently paralyzed ex-wife, and an arrogant young man with cerebral palsy and his new caregiver.

Lynn Nottage

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

Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

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.

2019 Prize Winners