Theater News

2003 Kesselring Prizes for Playwriting Announced

New York City
The National Arts Club has announced that Bridget Carpenter will be awarded the 2003 Kesselring Prize for playwriting for The Faculty Room. Carpenter’s award of $10,000, along with a $2,500 honorable mention award to Lynn Nottage for her play Intimate Apparrel, will be presented in a ceremony at the National Arts Club (15 Gramercy South) on Sunday, November 23 that will include a staged reading of The Faculty Room.

Originally produced as part of the 2003 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Carpenter’s play is set in a school’s faculty room where three teachers deal in secrets and forge or break alliances. Carpenter is an NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence at the Perseverance Theater in Alaska (where her new play The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair recently premiered) and was a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Her works have been developed and produced at the Public Theater, the Berkeley Repertory Company, Center Stage, and the Trinity Rep. One of her plays, Fall, received the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and is currently under option for a production in New York.

Nottage’s Intimate Apparel premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California. Her other plays include Por’Knockers, Poof!, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Mud, River, Stone, and Fabulation, which will have its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in June.

For additional information about The National Arts Club and its programs, phone 212-475-3424.