Tarell Alvin McCraney to Receive New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award

Brian Scott Lipton

New York City

May 14, 2009

Tarell Alvin McCraney
(© Greg Funnell)

The New York Times Company will present the first annual New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, a prize to honor an American playwright with a recent professional theater debut in New York City, to Tarell Alvin McCraney for his play The Brothers Size. A ceremony will be held on Wednesday, May 27 at The New York Times Building.

The show was presented at the Public Theater and is currently on view as part of The Brother/Sister Plays at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey.

"The committee was impressed by the sheer poetry of the language and the play's vibrant blend of richly specific contemporary characters with archetypes drawn from West African myth," said Sylviane Gold, chair of the award selection committee and a frequent contributor to The New York Times.

In addition to Gold, the members of the selection committee were playwrights Edward Albee, Richard Greenberg, James Lapine, and Lynn Nottage, along with the TImes cultural news editor Sam Sifton, theater editor Katherine E. Bouton, and Arts & Leisure theater editor Andrea Stevens.