By John Walker
Special to Inside
The Theatre School, DePaul University, announces the first recipient of the Cunningham Commission for Youth Theatre (previously known as the Cunningham Prize for Playwriting). The winner is Chicago-based playwright Douglas Post, who will receive $5,000 to draft, workshop and produce a script. The first draft will be due approximately one year after the commission is awarded.
"This Commission will serve Chicago Playworks, which was one of the first major theatres for children in the United States and has been the first theatre experience for generations of Chicago's young people," said Dean Corrin, head of The Theatre School's Playwriting Program and chair of the Theatre Studies Department. "The Commission will also give Theatre School students in all disciplines the opportunity to work on a world premiere by an experienced playwright. These new plays will provide our audiences (as well as the canon of children's theatre nationwide) with challenging new theatrical experiences. And the Commission continues the school's long history—dating back to the groundbreaking work of Charlotte Chorpenning—as an incubator for new plays for young audiences that will be produced at theatres across the country."
The Cunningham Commission for Youth Theatre is an annual project with the goal of developing plays for production by The Theatre School's award-winning Chicago Playworks for Families and Young Audiences series (founded as the Goodman Children's Theatre in 1925, the city's oldest continuously operating children's theatre) at the historic Merle Reskin Theatre. Each year Chicago Playworks productions are seen by 35,000 students and families from throughout the Chicago area. The Cunningham Commission was established at The Theatre School, DePaul University, to honor the memory of the Rev. Donald Cunningham, a Chicago priest, playwright and lover of theatre. It was established by an endowment gift from the Cunningham family, and is to encourage the writing of dramatic works for young audiences that affirm the centrality of religion, broadly defined, and the human quest for meaning, truth and community.
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