Awards
The Awards
Ollie
New Play Award
Our inaugural award, The Ollie Award, supports expansive, idea-driven artworks with inherently theatrical ways of illuminating big ideas and concepts. This award is intended for an early-career playwright to write a hugely ambitious new play.
We encourage these works to grapple with concepts and ideas that move the world, and approach them from a new perspective. Works might interrogate topics as multivalent as: science, history, philosophy, gender, race, politics, sexual orientation, technology, religion, money, global warming, and medicine, among others.
We are looking for playwrights who expand the boundaries of the art form and bring new subjects, ideas and metaphors to light. Through the Ollie, the Foundation stimulates voices in the theatre, nurtures bold new artists and incubates work that will influence ongoing cultural conversations.
Tooth of Time
Distinguished Career Award
The Tooth of Time award honors theatre artists who have had a substantial and important career of “idea-driven” works. The awardee will use this grant to create a new work.
We hope that the Tooth of Time will encourage theatre artists and audiences alike to engage with the titans of the art form in new ways and celebrate their contributions to the field. Often our culture celebrates the new and emerging artist and forgets to cultivate our most beloved writers who have accomplished the feat of duration and longevity. This award gives attention and opportunity to older writers who have made a significant impact on theatre.
The quote comes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “a forted residence ‘gainst the tooth of time / and razure of oblivion.” Our award helps provide that forted residence and allows those who have devoted their lives to the theatre a respite to re-engage with their work and create something new.
Vivace
Musical Theatre Award
Bret and Paul were great lovers of musical theatre. The Vivace Award is given to one musical theatre artist or musical theatre team to create an “idea-driven” piece. We embrace diverse artists from all disciplines of the genre. We give the award to artists who have the ability to create a musical with a big idea at its center, and music as its heart and soul.
Yes, we are in need of big ideas and visionary new work, but as the award is called Vivace, our new musical should also make us want to get up and dance. The Vivace Award winners expand our conception of what “musical theatre” can be. We have no requirements for the form or genre of a musical, but prefer that every element of the piece be original to the team and unwritten at the time of their submission (i.e., no jukebox musicals). However, we are open to great ideas that include existing material. We want to be receptive to every great idea that comes our way.
COVID-19 Response Grants
In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 theatre closures, we redirected our entire annual grant budget to emergency grants of $2500 to playwrights, composers, librettists, and lyricists who had a full professional show cancelled, closed, or indefinitely postponed due to COVID-19. In partnership with New Dramatists and The Venturous Theatre Fund of the Tides Foundation, we awarded 80 grants of $2,500, a total of $200,000, for theater writers impacted by the crisis.