Stacey Rose has been named the inaugural winner of the Bonnie and Terry Burman New Play Award, a new national play contest at Barrington Stage Company. Rose will be awarded $25,000, and her play America v. 2.1: The Sad Demise & Eventual Extinction of the American Negro will receive a world-premiere production at the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, venue.
Second-place winners Brent Askari (for American Underground) and Christina Quintana (for Citizen Scientist) will each receive $5,000 and a developmental staged reading.
“There are few words for how honored I am,” said Rose in a statement. “Having the play produced as well meets and exceeds my wildest dreams for the world premiere of this play.”
Set in the not-too-distant future, America v. 2.1, according to Barrington, is a “day in the life of a troupe of Black actors who are charged with re-enacting the revised history of the once-thriving American Negro. It quickly becomes a day of reckoning as the troupe is forced to face the parallels their own lives draw to the lives of the very Negroes whose stories they are compelled to tell.”
“I want to thank Bonnie and Terry Burman for recognizing the importance of discovering and supporting vital new voices in the American Theatre,” said Artistic Director Julianne Boyd. “Barrington Stage is thrilled to bring to life this summer Stacey Rose’s play, America v. 2.1: The Sad Demise & Eventual Extinction of the American Negro, a provocative, uncompromising look at Black Americans in post-apocalyptic America, and both Brent Askari and Christina Quintana share Stacey’s sense of urgency in telling stories that need to be heard now.”
CLICK HERE TO SEE A FULL LIST OF ANNOUNCED AND UPCOMING NATIONAL TOURS
The winning plays were chosen out of 461 submissions. In addition to the three winning plays, the other finalists for the Burman Award included Steel Her Bones by Thomas Gibbons, Eight Nights by Jennifer Maisel, 2144 South St. by Karina Billini, and (end of message) by Laura Jacqmi.
Rose is an alum of the Dramatic Writing MFA program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been presented at the Fire This Time Festival, the Brooklyn Generator, the Bushwick Starr Reading Series, Mosaic Theater, The Amoralists Theatre Company, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, National Black Theatre, Pillsbury House Theatre, and The Lark’s Playwrights' Week. She was a 2015–2016 Dramatist Guild Fellow, a 2017-2018 Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellow, and a 2018 Sundance Theatre Lab Fellow. She is a 2018–2021 Playwrights’ Center Core Writer, a member of the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit, and The Civilians R&D Group.
