"THE FIRST THEATRICAL LANDMARK OF THE TRUMP ERA: Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat is a tough yet empathetic portrait of the America that came undone." — Michael Schulman, The New Yorker
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
Sweat, by Lynn Nottage
For a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream.
Lynn Nottage accepts the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Sweat from Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger.
Winning Work
Sweat
Biography
Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: Sweat (Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por’knockers; and POOF!. Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Dramatist Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, Steinberg "Mimi" Distinguished Playwright Award, Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Obie Awards, Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards, Outer Critics Circle Award, Audelco Awards, Lilly Award, Helen Hayes Award, Lee Reynolds Award, NBT Fest's August Wilson Playwriting Award and a Guggenheim Grant. She's a member of The Dramatists Guild and the WGAE.
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2017:
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
2017 Prize Winners
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.
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.
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.
Art Cullen
For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.