This year’s winner of the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition will have its world premiere on the Hertz Stage at Alliance Theatre this month.
The 20th competition winner, “Furlough’s Paradise” is written by a.k. payne, a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. The production will run from Jan. 31 until March 3. Opening night will be Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m.
“I am excited to be selected as the winner of the 20th annual Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. I am grateful for any space to share work, to share work with audiences, and to have resources to fully actualize a dream,” said playwright a.k. payne said in a press release. “I think a lot about plays as like blueprints imagining freedom, or blueprints for imagining worlds, and the invitation to gather people. I feel like, with this particular play, the blueprint for me is about how do we imagine space to be together. And how is that revolutionary? So, I’m excited.”
“Furlough’s Paradise” follows Cousins Sade and Mina, raised like sisters but now leading very different lives, as they return to their childhood town for a funeral. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. But traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull them apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer’s impending arrival.
“These characters are fighting for moments,” said payne. “Because it’s been taken from them, they are fighting for moments to be in the same room together. A lot of the play is about being present and how we witness each other. How do we share space together. And so, my hope, for audiences, is the same – that they are invited into a chance to share; to share breath and to share air with people, I think that is really special.”
The Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition solicits plays from the leading MFA graduate programs in the United States and then conducts a rigorous selection process to find four finalists and one winning play. The winner receives a full production as part of the Alliance Theatre’s regular season.
Past winners of the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition have become some of today’s most exciting playwrights and writers, including Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” inspired the 2017 Academy Award-winning film “Moonlight,” and Marcus Gardley, who wrote the recent film adaptation of the musical, “The Color Purple.”
Tickets start at $25 and are available at the Alliance Theatre Box Office by calling (404) 733-4600. Tickets are available online at www.alliancetheatre.org/furloughsparadise.