The American dramatist Jackie Sibblies Drury has won this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female playwrights.
Drury receives $25,000 prize money after her play Fairview beat those by other finalists including debbie tucker green’s ear for eye, Nina Raine’s Stories, Ella Road’s The Phlebotomist and Ella Hickson’s The Writer, all of which received hit UK productions last year. Fairview will have its UK premiere at the Young Vic in London in November.
Drury has said that Fairview explores the theme of surveillance and “why surveillance feels more dangerous to people of colour” because of an implicit bias. When the play had its US premiere in the summer of 2018, at New York’s Soho Rep, the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “dazzling and ruthless” and wrote that it would have audiences “squirming” with a galvanising account of “racial alienation and division” that was comparable to An Octoroon and Underground Railroad Game.
Fairview opens as a family comedy centred around a dinner party but sneaks up on its audience. “Some time after the show has ended,” wrote Brantley, “you’ll realise just how artfully you have been toyed with before the final kill, as the mouse to one canny cat of a play.”
The awards ceremony took place at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, on Monday. The judges for the 2019 prize were Michael Buffong, Maria Manuela Goyanes, Marianne Elliott, Jennifer Haley, Tamsin Greig and Marin Ireland.
More than 150 plays were nominated for the prize, which has been awarded annually since 1978. Recent winners include Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which received its UK premiere at the Donmar Warehouse last year and transfers to the West End this summer.
