Emily Mann, Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre, has been named the recipient of the 2015 Margo Jones Award presented by The Ohio State University Libraries and OSU Arts and Humanities. The award honors those who have demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, and who have encouraged the living theatre everywhere.

 

Ms. Mann, multi-award-winning director and playwright, is celebrating her 25th season as Artistic Director of McCarter Theatre where she has overseen over 200 productions. Under Ms. Mann’s leadership, McCarter accepted the 1994 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater and the 2013 Tony Award for best new play for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Recent productions directed at McCarter include Antony & Cleopatra, Proof, A Delicate Balance, and the world premieres of The Convert (also at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and CTG in Los Angeles); The How and the Why; and Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I (also at Playwrights Horizons).

 

Notable Broadway productions include A Streetcar Named Desire, Anna in the Tropics, Execution of Justice (playwright and director), and Having Our Say, which Ms. Mann wrote and directed, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth.

 

Emily’s other plays include: Annulla, An Autobiography; Still Life; Greensboro (A Requiem); Meshugah; and Mrs. Packard. Her adaptations include: Antigone, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, a free adaptation of The Seagull: A Seagull in the Hamptons and The House of Bernarda Alba (recently staged in London). Ms. Mann’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage premiered this fall at New York Theatre Workshop. A winner of the Peabody Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award and the Edward Albee Last Frontier Directing Award, Emily is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on its council. She is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Princeton University.

 

The Margo Jones Award will be presented to Mann at the McCarter Theatre on May 16th at a ceremony which will include the notable speakers Nadine Strossen, Jade King Carroll, and Christopher Durang who was himself a recipient of the award (along with Marsha Norman) in 2004 for his work with the Julliard School’s Playwrights Program.

 

Members of the Medal Committee are Deborah Robison for the family of Jerome Lawrence; Janet Waldo Lee, Lucy Lee, and Jonathan Barlow Lee for the family of Robert E. Lee; and Nena Couch, Beth Kattelman, and Mary Tarantino for the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University.

 

About the Award

The Margo Jones Award honors that citizen-of-the-theatre who has demonstrated a significant impact, understanding and affirmation of the craft of playwriting, with a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the living theatre. The award was endowed by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee and with a gift from Tad Adoue, a close associate of Jones in Dallas, and is administered by The Ohio State University’s Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. The Margo Jones Medal commemorates one of the pioneers of the American professional regional theatre movement. Jones (1912-1955) supported and nurtured new plays at the theatre she founded in Dallas in 1947, including Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke and Lawrence and Lee’s Inherit the Wind. The pattern she created for developing new plays is now a standard method for producing new plays in the living American theatre. Among numerous previous recipients are Lucille Lortel, Adrian Hall, Joseph Papp, Jane Alexander, André Bishop, Al Hirschfeld, Ellen Stewart, Mel Gussow, Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, Bill Rauch, Anne Cattaneo and Howard Shalwitz.