2019 Recipients

2019 RECIPIENTS

Fastened To The Moon by Linda Kampley
First Prize for Excellence in Playwriting

Linda Kampley

FASTENED TO THE MOON with Petra Denison, Loren Bidner and James Nugent

Fastened To The Moon takes place in the early 70's on the West Coast of Florida when those who went into space still seemed greatly heroic, and on the other hand, drug dealing was something, well, that seemed totally innocent. The story involves Astronauts, a sheriff and an inexperienced young woman who can't come to terms with what she has gotten herself into, - having married a drug smuggling sociopath who may be trying to kill her. The play goes from actual time - a hot, humid August afternoon, miles from town on the Gulf of Mexico - to her fantasies, talking politely with the Astronauts who are brave, noble, and on a mission to help her, and then back to reality where she may soon be under arrest or perhaps murdered.

Petra Denison

Chekhov Out West/Two One-Act Comedies by Bill Cosgriff
Citation for Excellence in Playwriting

Bill Cosgriff and Carol Goldberg

VANYA GOES VEGAS with Deb Armelino and James Nugent

Deb Armelino, James Nugent

Chekhov Out West is the collective title given to two one-act comedies: What's It All About, Andrei? and Vanya Goes Vegas.

The first of these, What's It All About, Andrei?
a modernized fantasy on the story of Andrei, the brother in Chekhov's The Three Sisters, serves, structurally, as a curtain raiser for the second, longer play.
Andrei Protopopov is an unhappy man. Trying to escape the tedium of his life managing the Russian Groves Condominium in West Hollywood, and his shrewish wife, and his three loving but reproachful sisters, he is suddenly faced with an apparition from his past. Someone who is out for revenge. Someone he loved. What does he do?

Vanya Goes Vegas is a re-envisioning of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya - only this time set in a casino/hotel far, far off the Strip; a casino/hotel adrift in the 20th Century; a casino/hotel sometimes in 1905, sometimes in 1995, and most times, somewhere indeterminately in between.
Vanya and his niece, Sonya toil away, year after year, running a small out-of-the-way casino in Las Vegas, quite some distance from the famous "strip." They do it to help support Sonya's father (and Vanya's brother-in law), a professor whom they believe is making them proud as a respected academic in L.A.
The very meaning of their lives and their sacrifices are called into sharp question when Grigory Stepanovich, said professor, shows up unexpectedly at their doorstep along with his beautiful, and much younger wife, Yelena Ivanovna.
Her beauty (and his insensitive demands), set off a chain reaction of jealousy, disappointment-and even an attempted murder- among the members of this tightly knit household.

Aliyah by Kathryn Grant
Citation for Excellence in Playwriting

Kathryn Grant and Carol Goldberg

ALIYAH with Stephen Axelrod and Megan Greener

Aliyah
Aliyah, estranged from her family and approaching middle age without purpose or direction, joins a new-age, multi-cultural church that meets in an old, abandoned theater. Through the church's central tenet of "the oneness of all creation," she finds the serenity and strength to get her life moving forward. She becomes involved in the Church's outreach activities, volunteering in a shelter and planning to adopt through the church's program to unite parents with kids who need homes. At the same time, she realizes her dream of publishing quality young adult fiction. She even reaches out to her difficult father. Everything is finally falling into place. But when a shelter client brutally attacks her to within an inch of her life, she is thrown into a new world of connection. This is not what Aliyah expected when she embraced the Church's promise of the "oneness of all creation." In Hebrew, Aliyah means "one who travels to a higher place." Can Aliyah absorb her new reality without giving up on the promise her name implies?