OSF-Commissioned Playwright Naomi Wallace Wins Horton Foote Prize

American Revolutions play wins national prize; premieres July 2013

News Release

September 5, 2012

Ashland, Ore.— The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is thrilled with the recently announced news that playwright Naomi Wallace is one of two recipients of the 2012 Horton Foote Prize, a biennial award named for legendary playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote.

Wallace’s play, The Liquid Plain, commissioned through Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle, received the award for promising new American play. Wallace will receive $15,000 and a limited edition of Keith Carter’s photograph of Horton Foote (from the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.).

The Liquid Plain will premiere at OSF in 2013 and will run in the Thomas Theatre from July 2 to November 3. Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director at Baltimore’s CenterStage, will direct the production. Following its run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival the production will tour to CenterStage.

The Liquid Plain is also a recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New American Play Awards. Piloted in 2006 with the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, and launched nationally in 2007, The Edgerton Foundation gives plays in development extended rehearsal period for the creative teams and the playwrights.

OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch said, “Naomi has written a courageous and astonishingly beautiful new American play. We are so proud to be premiering it next season and to be sharing this award-winning piece with our audiences.”

The Liquid Plain, told with Wallace’s amazing lyricism and power, is set on the docks of late-18th-century Bristol, Rhode Island, where two runaway slaves find a near-drowned sailor. They plan a desperate and daring run to freedom, and as the mysteries of their identities come to light, truths about the past and present collide.

Wallace’s major plays include Things of Dry Hours, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, The War Boys, The Inland Sea and Birdy (an adaptation for the stage of William Wharton's novel). Her work has been produced internationally and has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Kesselring Prize, the Mobil Prize, an NEA grant, a Kentucky Arts Council Grant, a Kentucky Foundation for Women grant, and an Obie Award for best play. Wallace is also a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the grant popularly known as the genius award.

David Lindsay-Abaire, also awarded a 2012 Horton Foote Prize, received the outstanding new American play award for Good People. Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole was produced at OSF in the Thomas Theatre in 2007 and his play Fuddy Meers was staged in the Black Swan in 2001.