MARCELA LORCA, LISA PETERSON, JEFF + RICK KUPERMAN, KENNY LEON AND TAIBI MAGAR RECEIVED AWARDS FROM STAGE DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS FOUNDATION
Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the not-for-profit foundation affiliated with Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, has announced the honorees of this year’s Gordon Davidson Award, Zelda Fichandler Award, Joe A. Callaway Awards, and Breakout Award. The awards will be presented at an invitation-only event on Tuesday, November 12, 2019 in NYC.
SDCF Board President, Sheldon Epps said in a statement, “It will give us great pleasure and joy to celebrate these distinguished and greatly deserving winners and finalists at our awards evening in November. On behalf of the SDCF Board, I thank our colleagues on the Davidson, Fichandler, Callaway, and Breakout Committees for their service. The choices they have made this year represent the breadth and excellence of our membership and the extremely high quality of work that is currently being engendered by directors and choreographers throughout our field.”
The 2019 Gordon Davidson Award will be presented to Lisa Peterson. Lisa is a two-time OBIE Award-winning writer and director. She won her first OBIE for directing Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in 1990, and her second OBIE, as well as a Lortel Award, for writing and directing An Iliad with Denis O’Hare in 2012, also at NYTW. Since then, she and O’Hare have written The Good Book, commissioned and produced by the Court Theatre in Chicago, and recently at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Her directing work includes the world premiere productions of new plays by Tony Kushner, Beth Henley, Donald Margulies, Naomi Wallace and José Rivera.
The Davidson Award is bestowed by SDCF to recognize a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and distinguished service in regional theatre. The award is named for Gordon Davidson, the founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. This is the second year SDCF has given this award.
The 2019 Zelda Fichandler Award will be presented to winner Marcela Lorca, Artistic Director of Ten Thousand Things Theater Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. At Ten Thousand Things, Lorca has recently directed The Winter’s Tale, The Sins of Sor Juana and Into The Woods. Other recent Twin Cities credits include La Pasión Según San Marcos with Minnesota Orchestra, and Disgraced at the Guthrie Theater, McCarter Theatre Center and Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Previously she directed The Count of Montecristo at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Scorched at Syracuse Stage, Caroline; Or Change at The Guthrie Theater and Syracuse Stage, and Crimes of the Heart, The Burial at Thebes, and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde at the Guthrie Theater. She has worked at many regional theaters in the US as well as the Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil and Europe. Previously she was Movement Director and Choreographer for the Guthrie Theater, where she worked on over 150 plays and was a founding member of two actor training programs.
The Fichandler Award recognizes directors and choreographers who have demonstrated great accomplishment to-date and potential for the future with singular creativity and deep investment in a particular community or region, and is named for Zelda Fichandler, the founding artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. This year’s finalists, who will also be recognized for their contributions to the field, are Rick Dildine, artistic director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Montgomery, AL); Ron OJ Parson, resident artist at the Court Theatre (Chicago, IL) and a freelance director based in Chicago; and Blake Robison, artistic director of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (Cincinnati, OH). The Fichandler Award was first presented in 2009.
The 2019 Joe A. Callaway Awards will be awarded to Kenny Leon for excellence in directing for Much Ado About Nothing (The Public Theater) and Rick and Jeff Kuperman for excellence in choreography for Alice By Heart (MCC). Kenny Leon is a Tony Award-winning Broadway and television director. Broadway credits include American Son starring Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale, which was also adapted for Netflix; the revival of Children of a Lesser God; the Tupac musical Holler If Ya Hear Me; A Raisin in the Sun starring Denzel Washington (Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play and Best Revival of a Play); The Mountaintop starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett; and August Wilson’s Fences (which garnered ten Tony nominations and won three Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play). The Kuperman Brothers directing and choreography credits include Cyrano with The New Group in New York and at Goodspeed Opera House, A$AP Rocky’s performance art piece “Lab Rat,” Phish at Madison Square Garden, Beardo at Pipeline Theatre Company, The Light Princess at both A.R.T. and The New Victory, and Orpheus in the Berkshires at Williamstown Theatre Festival.
The Callaway Awards are peer-given awards recognizing excellence in the arts of stage direction and choreography in a given New York City Off-Broadway season. Callaway finalists for excellence in direction are Annie Tippe for Octet (Signature Theatre) and Stephen Brackett for A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons). The finalists for excellence in choreography are Raja Feather Kelly for Fairview (SoHo Rep., Theatre for a New Audience) and A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons); and Camille A. Brown for Much Ado About Nothing (The Public Theater). The Callaway Award was first presented in 1989.
The 2019 Breakout Award winner is director Taibi Magar. Notable works to date include Blue Ridge and The Great Leap at Atlantic Theatre Company; Is God Is at Soho Rep, which earned her the 2018 Obie Award; and Underground Railroad Game at Ars Nova. Magar will direct Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at Signature Theatre this spring. The Breakout Award, now in its fourth year, is given by the SDCF Board of Trustees to an SDC Member for a production or selection of work that signals a shift in a career and the beginning of critical recognition – a “rising star” moment in the Off-Broadway arena.
Highlights from the Evening
