The 2022 Idea Awards for Theatre

All photographs by Marco Quezada for The Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation.

The recipients received their awards at THE PLAYERS CLUB on October 3, 2022 in a ceremony that recognized and celebrated their achievements.

2022 Ollie Award for New Play:
ankita raturi

2022 Tooth of Time Award for Distinguished Career:
deb margolin

2022 Vivace Award for Musical Theatre:
John-Michael Lyles
Daniel Alexander Jones

About the Winners

Deb Margolin - Tooth of Time Award Winner

Deb Margolin is a playwright, actor, and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is the author of numerous plays, including Imagining Madoff (nominee, Helen Hayes / Charles Macarthur Award for Outstanding New Play),   Three Seconds in the Key (Kesselring Prize), Turquoise, Bringing the Fishermen Home, and That Old Perplexity (Keen Company commission)as well as 11 solo performance plays which she has toured throughout the US. These include 8 STOPS, a comedy concerning the grief of endless compassion, which takes a long, humorous, tender look at motherhood, the suburbs, the fear of death, and the inheritability of ideas. Her most recent multi-character play, Insurrection, finds an old man near the precipice of  death as he suffers the torment of remembered horror at the hands of Joseph McCarthy. Deb has been resident artist at Tulane, Hampshire College, NYU, USC, and many others. OBIE award for Sustained Excellence of Performance, the Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award, NEA grant, NJSCA Fellow, Edwin Booth Award, Tanne Foundation Award, and the Richard H. Broadhead Prize for teaching excellence at Yale University, where she is Professor in the Practice in the undergraduate Theater and Performance Studies Program. She is a proud alumna of New Dramatists, and lives in New Jersey, which she denies.

Ankita Raturi - Ollie Award Winner

Ankita Raturi (she/her) is a bisexual, bicultural, bilingual writer currently living in southern California. She grew up in and around New Delhi, Jakarta, and Washington D.C., and has spent many years living and working in New York City. Ankita writes in Hindi/Urdu and English about the impossibilities of language, living between cultural identities, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism. Her plays are often populated with queer, femme characters navigating new and unfamiliar territory. Ankita is the inaugural recipient of the Asian Pacific American Friends of the Theater & Artists at Play Emerging Playwright Commission. She is also the recipient of a Sloan Commission with Ensemble Studio Theatre. Her audio play, Backwaters, is available to listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as part of the 2021 Wagner New Play Festival. Ankita has developed new plays through UCSD, NYU, Artist at Play L.A., Ensemble Studio Theatre, The COOP, Atlantic Pacific Theatre, Theater Masters, The Hearth Theater, Hypokrit Theatre Company, New York Shakespeare Exchange, Pete’s Candy Store, and Natyabharati. Her devised work with co-creator Charlotte Murray has been seen at Fresh Ground Pepper, Corkscrew Theater Festival, and Dixon Place. Ankita has a B.F.A. in Drama from NYU. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Playwriting at UC San Diego with the guidance and mentorship of Naomi Iizuka and Deborah Stein.

John-Michael Lyles - Vivace Award Winner

John-Michael Lyles is a Harlem-based, Texas-raised, multi-hyphenate creative. He was selected to participate in the Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellows class of ’21, Musical Theater Factory’s 2nd MAKERS Cohort and the 2021 Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. He wrote additional music for the Second Stage production of Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die & theme music for The Great Gay Dadcast. He is currently co-writing book, music and lyrics with David Gomez for Shoot for the Moon, a new musical. He is currently developing a new untitled musical with incredible support from 5th Avenue Theater’s “First Draft: Raise Your Voice” commission program. As an actor, he’s currently making his Broadway debut in the Pulitzer Prize winning musical, A Strange Loop! 

Daniel Alexander Jones - Vivace Award Winner

Daniel Alexander Jones is hailed by audiences, colleagues and critics as a groundbreaking and visionary artist. Over 25 years into his distinctive interdisciplinary practice, Jones deftly weaves performance art, theatre, music, writing, and teaching into a wildflower body of work. His pieces include: www.aten.life, which premiered as a digital music, video and interactive site (CalArts Center for New Performance & New York Live Arts); BLACK LIGHT (Public Theater); DUAT (Soho Rep); and PHOENIX FABRIK (Pillsbury House Theatre). 53rd State Press recently published LOVE LIKE LIGHT, a collection of 7 works from across Jones’s career, featuring introductory essays from a range of collaborators and colleagues; as well as the book PARTICLE & WAVE, a contextualizing conversation with Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Jones’s practice. Daniel was honored as the 2021 PEN America/Laura Pels Foundation awardee in Theatre, and was praised for “perfecting a dramaturgy all his own based in the traditions of Africana studies, performance studies, queer theory, and mysticism, challenging established traditions while creating space for audiences to ponder what theater is and who it is for." Jones was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist, a USA Artist Fellow, a Creative Capital Grantee, and has been commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and the Public Theatre. He has taught at university for 20 years, most recently as a Full Professor at Fordham University. Daniel lives in Los Angeles, where he is a Producing Artist for the Center for New Performance at CalArts, and is in residence with UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.