A Strange Loop
This afternoon, award administrator Dana Canedy announced the 104th class of Pulitzer Prize winners. The prize for drama, given “for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life,” also includes a $15,000 cash award.
This year’s winner is Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, which the award committee described as “a metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.” It is the tenth musical to win the prize since 1917.
Two finalists were also named. One is Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, described as “a scrupulously hewn drama centering on four alumni of a conservative Catholic college who confront themselves and each other, clashing over theology, politics and personal responsibility.”
The other finalist is David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power, described as “a multi-layered and mischievous musical that deconstructs a beloved, original American art form to examine the promise and the limits of representation in both the theatrical and political senses of the word.”
All three shows premiered Off-Broadway: A Strange Loop and Heroes of the Fourth Turning at Playwrights Horizons, Soft Power at the Public Theater.
This year’s jury included artistic director Wendy Goldberg (National Playwrights Conference), writer-editor Naveen Kumar, critic Dominic Papatola (Pioneer Press), director Janice Simpson (CUNY School of Journalism), and professor Alisa Solomon (Columbia University).