Yale Drama Series Prize, Joyce Awards, and More

BUFFALO, N.Y.: The Alleyway Theatre has named Karissa Murrell Myers the recipient of the 2024 Mazumdar New Play Award. Myers’s award-winning play Black Bear Island will be produced by the Alleyway in their 2024-25 season.

A panel of 80 theatre artists determined 22 Mazumdar Award semifinalists over the course of a year. The Alleyway artistic team then selected Myers’s play in addition to finalists The Lost Women by Nubia Monks; Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin by Dianne Nora; and Wife of Headless Man Investigates Her Own Disappearance by Yussef El Guindi.

Black Bear Island, a 2024 National Playwrights Conference finalist and Blue Ink Award semifinalist, follows a woman who returns to her hometown in the Pacific Northwest after the mysterious death of her estranged childhood sweetheart. The Alleyway’s production of Black Bear Island will be produced in February 2025, directed by Daniel F. Lendzian.

Mazumdar is a Chicago-based playwright, actor, producer, and casting director and is the co-founding artistic director of Bramble Theatre Company.

The Mazumdar New Play Award has been presented annually since 1989 in memory of Canadian actor and playwright Maxim Mazumdar.

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