The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation has announced the recipients of their 2024 Idea Awards for Theatre. The awards will be presented November 15 in an invitation-only ceremony, featuring performances by this year's Vivace Musical Theatre Award winners.
The Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award will be presented to Luis Valdez (Zoot Suit, La Bamba). Awarded to an accomplished playwright who has created significant works throughout their career, the honor includes a $25,000 prize.
Two $25,000 prizes are also awarded annually to emerging talent with ambitious theatrical ideas. Daria Miyeko Marinelli will receive this year's Ollie New Play Award. Two Vivace Musical Theatre Awards will be presented, with the first shared by AG, MILCK, and Sam Chanse; and another to Dan Fishback. Each of the six artists will also receive a statuette, hand-carved by Bruce Ostler.
"The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation created the Idea Awards for Theatre to encourage expansive, idea-driven artworks with inherently theatrical ways of illuminating big ideas and concepts,” Bruce Ostler, vice president and board member of The Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation, said in a statement. “With our grants, we hope to give ambitious writers the needed time and space to explore big, complex ideas. These plays take a community to build, so we are also partnering with theatre companies and producers to further develop our awarded projects, and get these pieces out to audiences. We are proud to present the Ollie Award for the most ambitious new play by an emerging playwright, two Vivace Awards for big-idea new musicals, and the Tooth of Time Award to honor artists who have a substantial and important career of idea-driven theatrical works.”
"Luis Valdez is a titan upon whose back the Chicano theatre movement stands. He has created work over six decades, as a solo artist and with his company El Teatro Campesino, that has engaged movements and inspired generations of artists after him," added Kate Bussert, executive director of the foundation. "Our musical theatre winners this year are each using the form to grapple with big societal issues in a theatrical way. Dan Fishback is telling his story of living with ME/CFS with his new musical Dan Fishback Is Alive, Unwell, And Living In His Apartment; and is transforming his illness and isolation into a radically welcoming, care-full rock concert that will use theatrical tools in new ways to make the event accessible and beautiful. And the team of AG, MILCK, and Sam Chanse are creating The Family Album, which will follow a Chinese-American survivor of sexual assault as she breaks through cultural taboos and family pressure to stay silent. And finally, our new play winner Daria Miyeko Marinelli is dreaming up an immersive piece that will weave together three family lineages over a century of time, interrogating the legacies and mythologies we inherit from our ancestors. Each of these six artists is so deserving, and we are thrilled to welcome them into our community."
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