Yale Drama Series – serie

Announcing the 2007 winner of the Yale Drama SeriesJohn Connolly’s The Boys from Siam has been chosen as the first winner of the Yale Drama Series. This play was selected by playwright and contest judge Edward Albee, winner of the Pulitzer prize. Based loosely on the lives of nineteenth-century brothers Chang and Eng Bunker (the source of the term “Siamese twins”), The Boys from Siam is the haunting and lyrical story of conjoined twins Pigg and Pegg. In his foreword, Edward Albee writes that the work is “a beautifully realized concentrated universe. It takes big chances along the way . . . and makes us care—really care.”For more information and complete rules for the Yale Drama Series, visit yalebooks.com

Neil Wechsler’s Grenadine has been chosen as the second winner of the Yale Drama Series. The play was selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and contest judge Edward Albee. Grenadine is the fantastical story of a man’s quest for love in the company of three devoted friends. Albee writes, “I found it highly original. . . . The questions the play asks and the answers it proposes are provocative; the play stretched my mind.” About the Yale Drama SeriesYale University Press, the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the David Charles Horn Foundation are proud co-sponsors of this major competition to support emerging playwrights. Each year’s winner receives the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000, publication of the manuscript by Yale University Press, and a staged reading at Yale Repertory Theatre. For more information and complete rules for the Yale Drama Series, visit yalebooks.com.

The third winner of the Yale Drama Series competition for emerging playwrights—a haunting and provocative imagining of the reunion, years later, of a Guantánamo detainee and the female interrogator who tortured himIt’s been fifteen years since Guantánamo, fifteen years since Bashir last saw his U.S. Army interrogator, Alice. Bashir is now dying of a disease of the liver, an organ that he believes is the home of the soul. He tracks down Alice in Texas and demands that she donate half her liver as restitution for the damage wrought during her interrogations.But Alice doesn’t remember Bashir; a PTSD pill trial she participated in while in the army has left her without any memory of her time there. It is only when her inquisitive fourteen-year-old daughter begins her own investigation that the fragile peace of mind that Alice’s drug-induced oblivion enabled begins to falter.Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s powerful drama asks important and difficult questions: Is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning, or is it an obstacle to be overcome? Will the price of our national political amnesia be paid only by the next generation—the daughters and sons who were never there?Upon awarding the prize, David Hare wrote, “We admired the play because—although it was stylishly written, although the governing metaphor and basic realism were held in a fine balance—it also recalled the political urgency which had propelled a previous generation of writers into the theatre in the first place.”

Announcing the 2011 winner in the Yale Drama SeriesWhen he was twelve, Joe snuck into the field on the edge of town and saw the Town Mayor with his sister Peregrine. This one moment has overwhelmed and transformed his life, becoming the only thing that holds any importance to him. Years later, in jail for murder, Joe waits for Peregrine so that he can explain his plan for her future, a plan so intricately assembled that he has given it a name—New Light Shine.Four characters in Shannon Murdoch's bold new play are trapped in an argument of memory that threatens to turn perception into truth. Their task is to dig through years of silence and half-truths to arrive at a future that may at last bring peace. In the ensuing struggles, disturbing questions arise—about female and child sexuality as well as the responsibilities of government and community in raising children.Selecting Murdoch's New Light Shine from more than 800 submissions that arrived from the far reaches of the English-speaking world, contest judge John Guare praises the distinct voice of this play and its challenging subject. "I read it, put it aside, went back to it, couldn't get it out of my head," he recollects. "This raw, haunting, richly poetic, deeply emotional play affected me as no other entry did."

The 2012 winner of the Yale Drama SeriesA fifteen-year-old boy decides to accompany his severely depressed high school French teacher on a road trip to the Canadian province of Quebec, where the mother tongue of Voltaire and Balzac is still spoken and cherished. Clarence Coo’s mesmerizing new play is a delicious amalgam of farce and tragedy, a carnival funhouse with very dark corners. Wildly inventive and heartbreakingly sad, the strange odyssey of Jimmy and the unpredictable Mr. Green takes many surprising turns, crossing the border from reality into unreality and back again while encountering displaced characters from history, literature, and the mundane, often dangerous world. Selected by Tony Award–winning playwright John Guare (House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and others) from over 1,000 submissions from 29 countries, Clarence Coo’s Beautiful Province is the sixth winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize. In his foreword, Guare calls Coo’s work “elusive and haunting . . . funny, desperate, insane,” praising it for “its intriguing story [and] its tone, sustained to the very end.” Lyrical and adventurous, Beautiful Province is an outstanding new theatrical work, well deserving of these accolades and more.

The 2014 winner of the Yale Drama Series  “The play does not have a tragic ending, though you will be certain that it must. But it is a tragic story. It is the tragedy of lives lived without hope of deliverance. . . .   I will leave you to read the play and determine how on earth we get to a satisfying ending to this tragic tale of a woman without a chance. But that ending is the genius of Nabers’s work, her faith in the ability of people with no chance, to find one.”—Marsha Norman, from the Foreword  The year is 1979 and a serial killer in Atlanta is abducting and murdering young black children. Against a backdrop of fear and uncertainty, playwright Janine Nabers explores the emotional battleground where an African-American single mother wars with her teenage daughter, each coping in her own way with personal tragedy and loss. The volatility of their situation is intensified when a severely damaged and devastatingly handsome stranger becomes an integral part of their lives.            Serial Black Face is the eighth winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Marsha Norman. At once startling, engrossing, suspenseful, and exhilarating, Nabers’s powerful drama employs a real-life nightmare, the Atlanta Child Murders of the late 1970s, to incisively examine human frailty and the prickly complexities of a mother-daughter relationship. A stunning theatrical work, both thoughtful and profoundly moving, Serial Black Face is richly deserving of this year’s prize.

A Yale Drama Series-winning play about self-defense, desire, and healing in the aftermath of a college rapeSeven college students gather for a DIY self-defense workshop after a sorority sister is raped. They practice using their bodies as weapons. They wrestle with their desires. They learn the limits of self-defense.  This new play by writer, director, actor, and community builder Liliana Padilla explores the intersection of sex, community, and what it means to heal in a violent world. Padilla shows how learning self-defense becomes a channel for these college students’ rage, anxiety, confusion, trauma, and desire. The play examines what one wants, how to ask for it, and the ways rape culture threatens one’s body and sense of belonging.  It is the thirteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and the second one chosen by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.

An absurdist comedy and fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, exploring family, religion, identity, desire, and beauty in Korean American culture  In a fantastical fairy-tale world, two Korean American sisters are deemed too fat to fit in their family grave. Will the sisters’ close bond survive under the pressure of their community and fretful parents, who will spare no effort to make them tinier?  Jar of Fat, the fifteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, is a phantasmagorical, absurdist Korean American tale about the allure and danger entangled within the quest for beauty and thinness. Both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply troubling, Seayoung Yim’s play burns through the accumulated rage that anti-fat bias produces to reclaim what it steals from us every day: grace, space, possibility, and breath.

The sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, a big-hearted evocation of queer intimacy set in a bathhouse at the end of the world  In this love letter to queer bathhouse culture, the Presenter, a Mexican-American public-speaking student, is thrust into the landscapes of queer intimacy, colonialism, and erotic community when their class presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing starts to unravel. What had been a single presentation soon becomes a chorus, joining student presenters with the ghosts of bathhouses past, present, and future, along with the cleaning staff, A Conquistador!, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control, to explore queer desire and the gleeful delights of messiness. Here in the bathhouse at the end of the world, Jesús I. Valles conjures the ever-present yearning for skin to touch skin, a place of connection that shimmers in the steam of the bathhouse and refuses to ever fully fade.  Bathhouse.pptx is the sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and first winner chosen by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

The 2024 winner of the Yale Drama Series  “In a time of immense political and social upheaval when it feels as though hopelessness is a cloud that hangs heavy over all our interactions, this dry spell hit me like a cleansing rain.”—Jeremy O. Harris  After one night together in the desert, Grace uproots their life to chase after Brahm, a person who is slowly becoming a cactus. Not known for having a green thumb, Grace tends to Brahm and the seeds of their own doubt. Can the desert be a place for love to grow, or are they both just waiting for rain? This deeply personal play aims to provide nourishment to those hiding in the shadows and create a space of recognition and magic for all.  this dry spell is the seventeenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and the second winner chosen by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

In the eighteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, the lives of four very different women collide on a Christmas Eve in Santa Fe“A good playwright has to have some personal sense of what language is for and why we use it. Stess seems to me to revel in its power to convey and map our interiors, to be the medium through which we shape the story we tell ourselves and call our life.”—Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, from the ForewordIn this occasionally off-kilter and deeply honest play about isolation, resilience, and the healing power of community, Ariel Stess intertwines the lives of four women from different generations and social strata in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kara wakes up to find her husband and children missing. Twenty-one-year-old Emma runs away with a married man. Barbara’s ex-lover breaks into her home in the middle of the night. And the pipes in Miranda’s house burst. Through a tapestry of internal monologues and scenes, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA follows the journeys of four women whose major life crises collide on Christmas Eve, leading them to accidentally help each other find a way forward.The play, the 2025 winner of the Yale Drama Prize, was chosen by competition judge Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright.