WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES BETH HYLAND AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2024 L. ARNOLD WEISSBERGER NEW PLAY AWARD
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE
TONY AWARD®-RECOGNIZED
WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL
ANNOUNCES
BETH HYLAND
AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE
2024 L. ARNOLD WEISSBERGER NEW PLAY AWARD
New York, NY (March 28, 2024) – Williamstown Theatre Festival (Jenny Gersten, Interim Artistic Director) is pleased to announce Beth Hyland as the recipient of the 2024 L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award for her play SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA. Hyland will receive the $10,000 award and the accompanying $10,000 Jay Harris Commission to write a new play. SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA will also receive a reading at the Festival this summer as part of the Fridays@3 reading series, showcasing new work in development.
Geffen Playhouse, led by new artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney, has committed to further development of the piece in their 2024-2025 season.
In SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA, a tragicomic exploration of women’s creativity and women’s madness, love and art collide with supernatural consequences. Sally, a once-celebrated novelist grappling with writer’s block and overshadowed by her husband Theo’s rising literary fame, seeks solace and inspiration in the iconic Boston apartment once inhabited by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Intent on completing her novel about Plath’s life and salvaging her faltering marriage, Sally’s plans take a haunting turn when she begins experiencing spectral encounters that challenge her perception of reality. As the boundaries between truth and fiction blur, Sally confronts the ghosts of her past, threatening to unravel both her sanity and her artistic vision.
Williamstown Theatre Festival administers the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award on behalf of WTF Trustee Emeritus Fredda Harris and the Anna L. Weissberger Foundation. Championed for the Festival in 1998 by Fredda’s late husband and former WTF Trustee Jay Harris, the award honors noted theatrical attorney and avid theater supporter L. Arnold Weissberger, and it is designed to recognize excellence in playwriting. Recent recipients of the award include Clarence Coo for Chapters of a Floating Life (2023), Mike Lew for tiny father (2022), John J. Caswell, Jr. for Wet Brain (2021), and Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning English (2020) which will open on Broadway this December.
Submissions for the award are by invitation only and are carefully evaluated by a team of readers over the course of six months. The finalist plays are considered by a panel of three judges. The finalists for the 2024 award were Good Time Charlie by Ryan Haddad, Jar of Fat by Seayoung Yim, and Only Some of God’s Children or Mississippi Magnolias by Paris Crayton III. The finalist judges for the 2024 award were WTF artists Jennifer Chang and Lee Sunday Evans and Williams College faculty Karen Shepard.
Additional plays as part of the 2024 Fridays@3 reading series and other programming for the 2024 WTF Summer Season will be announced in the coming weeks.
As previously announced, the 2024 WTF Summer Season will include “WTF IS NEXT,” (August 1 – August 4) an expansive four-day prototype of a new vision for the Tony Award-recognized Festival, the return to fully staged productions with Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Mama, Part II of The Dragon Cycle, directed by Andrew Russell (July 2 – July 14), and the world premiere of David Ives’ new play Pamela Palmer directed by Walter Bobbie (July 23 – August 10), Rachel Bloom’s musical comedy Death, Let Me Do My Show directed by Seth Barrish (July 5 – July 14), the WTF Cabaret’s return to the Festival Stage, and The Plastic Bag Store, an immersive art experience by Robin Frohardt being presented with MASS MoCA (May 9 – September 2).
BIOGRAPHIES
Beth Hyland is a playwright and screenwriter based in Southern California. Her plays and musicals include SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA; Fires, Ohio; Seagulls; Killed A Man (Joking); grippy sock vacation; All-One! The Dr. Bronner’s Play; Clearing; For Annie; and Red Bowl at the Jeffs. Her plays have been produced and developed regionally at Steppenwolf’s LookOut Series, Goodman Theatre’s New Stages, Know Theatre, Provincetown Theatre, B Street Theatre, Oak Park Festival Theatre, and Octagon Theatre Bolton; in New York at Manhattan Theatre Club and the Hearth; and around Chicago at Jackalope Theatre, First Floor Theater, the Story Theatre, Bramble Theatre, Broken Nose Theatre, The Sound in collaboration with Joe Swanberg, and others. Her play Fires, Ohio was the 2023 recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Prize and the Mark Twain Award for Comic Playwriting. She co-founded The Sound, an itinerant Chicago storefront theater, with artistic director Rebeca Willingham. Her short film “Clambake,” directed by Sammy Zeisel, was an official selection of the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival and the Santa Monica Film Festival. She is currently a second-year playwriting MFA student at UC San Diego under the mentorship of Naomi Iizuka and Deborah Stein. BA: Kenyon College. Representation: Jamie Kaye-Phillips, Paradigm Talent Agency. www.bethhyland.com
ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL
For seven decades, the Tony Award-recognized Williamstown Theatre Festival has brought emerging and professional theater artists together in the Berkshires to create a thrilling summer festival of diverse, world premiere plays and musicals, bold new revivals, and a rich array of accompanying cultural events.
Artists are drawn to Williamstown Theatre Festival to make great theater in an environment conducive to artistic risk-taking. Matthew Broderick, Audra McDonald, Dominique Morisseau, Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Stroman, Uma Thurman, and Blair Underwood are just a few of the luminous theater artists who have worked at the Festival. Many others, including Sterling K. Brown, Ty Burrell, Charlie Day, Paul Giamatti, Kathryn Hahn, Allison Janney, Brie Larson, Chris Pine, and George C. Wolfe, began their careers at the Festival.
Productions and artists shaped at the Festival fill theaters in New York City and around the world. Recently, Williamstown Theatre Festival was represented on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally by The Sound Inside, Grand Horizons, The Rose Tattoo, The Visit, Fool for Love, The Elephant Man, Seared, Selling Kabul, Unknown Soldier, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost of Living, and Lempicka, which made its Broadway debut this month.
Learn more about Williamstown Theatre Festival at www.wtfestival.org.
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