The 2019 Idea Awards for Theatre

All photographs by Valerie Caviness Photography for The Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation.

The recipients received their awards at New Dramatists on September 23, 2019 in a ceremony that recognized and celebrated their achievement with speeches from Sheilah Rae, Andre Bishop and others.

2019 Ollie Award for New Play:
Dave Harris

2019 Tooth of Time Award for Distinguished Career:
Tina Howe
Adrienne Kennedy

2019 Vivace Award for Musical Theatre:
Melissa Li & Kit Yan

About the Winners

Adrienne Kennedy - Tooth of Time Award Winner

Adrienne Kennedy continues to influence the world through her art. She was the recipient of the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lila Wallace—Reader's Digest Writers' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Literature Award. She was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, awarded the Pierre Lecomte du Novy Award, and ended her academic career teaching at Harvard. Kennedy was playwright-in-residence at the Signature Theatre in New York City during their 1996-1997 season. Her play Movie Star is in a volume of Norton Anthology of American Literature and her play “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” most recently performed at the Classical Theatre of Harlem in NYC, is a landmark piece that speaks to students trying to find a place in the world.Her plays are taught in classrooms and performed in theatres all over the world.

Tina Howe - Tooth of Time Award Winner

Tina Howe’s most produced plays include “Birth and After Birth”, “Museum”, “The Art of Dining”, “Painting Churches”, “Coastal Disturbances”, “Approaching Zanzibar” and “Pride’s Crossing”. These and other works premiered at the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Second Stage, The Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Atlantic Theater Company, Primary Stages as well as being translated and produced abroad. Among her many awards are an Obie for Distinguished playwriting, a Tony nomination for best Play, an Outer Circle Critics Award, a Rockefeller Grant, two N.E.A. Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Sidney Kingsley Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, two honorary degrees, the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre, a Lilly Award for Lifetime Achievement, and most recently, PEN’s Master American Playwright award in 2015. A two time finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Ms. Howe has taught at NYU, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA before becoming Visiting Professor at Hunter College in 1990, then going on to launch the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting in 2010 as Playwright-in-Residence. Her works can be read in numerous anthologies as well as in Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe and Birth and After Birth and Other Plays: A Marriage Cycle, published by Theatre Communications Group. Her other publications include her translations of Ionesco's “The Bald Soprano" and "The Lesson" (Grove Press) and Shrinking Violets and Towering Tiger Lilies: Seven Brief Plays about Women in Distress, (Samuel French), She is also the subject of Howe in an Hour, edited by Judith Barlow, published by Smith and Kraus. Ms. Howe is proud to have served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990.

Dave Harris - Ollie Award Winner

Dave Harris is a poet and playwright from West Philly. He is the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Roundabout Theatre Company. His play EXCEPTION TO THE RULE will have its world premiere at Roundabout Underground in spring 2020. His plays have been produced or developed by Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, Roundabout Underground, Manhattan Theater Club, Victory Gardens, The Kennedy Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, and Ojai Playwrights Conference amongst others. Honors include: the 2019 Ollie Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Award and Mark Twain Award from The Kennedy Center, the 2018 Venturous Fellowship from The Lark, Cave Canem poetry fellowship, and a semi-finalist for The Relentless Award amongst others. His first full-length collection of poetry, Patricide, was published in May 2019 from Button Poetry. Dave received his B.A. from Yale University and is a third year MFA playwright at UC San Diego. UPCOMING: INCENDIARY (Goodman Theatre New Stages Festival, Chicago, fall 2019), EXCEPTION TO THE RULE (Roundabout Underground, NYC, spring 2020).

Melissa Li and Kit Yan - Vivace Award Winners

About Melissa Li

Melissa Li is a composer, lyricist, performer, and writer. She is a recipient of the Jonathan Larson Award, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow, a Lincoln Center Theater Writer-in-Residence, a 2019 Musical Theatre Factory Maker, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a former Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellow. Musicals include Interstate (New York Musical Festival, Winner “Outstanding Lyrics”), Surviving the Nian (The Theater Offensive, IRNE Award Winner for "Best New Play" 2007), and 99% Stone (The Theater Offensive). Her works have received support from 5th Avenue Theatre, The Village Theater, Musical Theater Factory, National Performance Network, New England Foundation for the Arts, Dixon Place, and terraNOVA Collective, among others. Melissa has released music as a solo artist and collaboratively, including 2 Seconds Away, Drive Away Home (as Good Asian Drivers), and The Beginning (as Melissa Li & The Barely Theirs). She is proud to be from Boston, and proud to be based in NYC and Baltimore.

About Kit Yan

Kit Yan (Playwright/Poet/Performer/Lyricist) is a Yellow American New York based artist, born in Enping, China, and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaii. My work is a dreamspace where queer and transgender folx time travel in order to witness, remember, and heal our herstories. I hold writing as a spaceship into the borderless ancestral past, the puzzle pieces of an imagined queertureverse, and a lifeline back onto this earth. Here, we can ground, explore, and discover stories on our own terms—messy, ugly, and wholly beautiful. My dreams lead me to write about the fractures in my life and in this world, the times I fucked up, the times I was held accountable by my family and communities, the times of collective struggle on a path towards collective liberation. Above all else, I write about queer love smashing racism, patriarchy, and systemic oppressions.