Gabriel Ebert, Santino Fontana, Linda Lavin, Mary Louise Wilson Among Obie Award Winners

The Village Voice presented the 57th Annual Obie Awards, honoring the best of Off-Broadway Theater, at Webster Hall on Monday, May 21.

Amy Herzog won an Obie for Best New American Play for 4000 Miles, which comes with a $1,000 cash award; Kirsten Greenidge won an Obie for playwriting for Milk Like Sugar; and a lifetime achievement Obie was given to playwright Caridad Svich.

Actors who received Obies were Cherise Boothe (Milk Like Sugar), Steven Boyer (Hand to God), Gabriel Ebert (4000 Miles), Jim Fletcher (Gatz), Santino Fontana (Sons of the Prophet), Linda Lavin (The Lyons), Susan Pourfar (Tribes), Mary Louise Wilson (4000 Miles), and the ensemble cast of the Public Theater’s Sweet and Sad, which featured Jon DeVries, Shuler Hensley, Maryann Plunkett, Laila Robbins, Jay O. Sanders and J. Smith-Cameron

Other winners included directors Richard Maxwell and Jay Scheib, and designers Mark Barton, Mimi Lien, and Matt Tierney and Ben Williams.

Winners of special citations were Elevator Repair Service; director John Tiffany, choreographer Steven Hoggett, and orchestrator Martin Lowe of the musical Once, which premiered last year at New York Theatre Workshop before moving to Broadway earlier this year; Mark Bennett, Denis O’Hare, Lisa Peterson and Stephen Spinella for their work on An Iliad; playwright Erin Courtney and director Ken Rus Schmoll for their work on A Map of Virtue; writer and solo performer Daniel Kitson for It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later; and
Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra for No Place to Go.

The Ross Wetzsteon Grant, which comes with a $1,000 prize, was presented to
Youngblood, a playwriting collective of Ensemble Studio Theatre, while $2,500 grants were awarded to The Bushwick Starr and The Debate Society.

For TheaterMania’s previous story on the Obies, click here.