Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose coming-of-age drama Choir Boy continues through Oct. 13 at the Alliance Theatre, has been named one of 24 MacArthur “Genius” Award winners.
The award-winning fellows, a mix of choreographers, writers, musicians, historians, physicians and scientists, each receive a “no-strings-attached” stipend of $625,000, paid over five years. The awards are widely recognized as a mark of achievement and future promise.
McCraney, 32, is a member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company and a writer whose work has been produced in London, New York and across the United States. Choir Boy examines competition and homophobia at an elite all-boys prep school where music is central. His most well-known work to date is a triptych titled The Brother/Sister Plays (2009), which weaves West African Yoruban mythology with modern-day stories about family, self-sacrifice, unrequited love and coming of age. One of those three plays, In the Red and Brown Water, won the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition in 2008 and was produced on the Alliance’s Hertz Stage.
In honoring McCraney, the MacArthur Foundation also cited his commitment to bringing theater to elementary and secondary school students, particularly in underserved communities in his hometown of Miami. McCraney received a B.F.A. (2003) from DePaul University and an M.F.A. (2007) from Yale University. He was the International Writer in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2008–10), where he remains an associate artist. He’s also a resident playwright at New Dramatists in New York and a member of Teo Castellanos D-Projects in Miami.
For more on McCraney, read this Encore FEATURE.
For more on the 2013 MacArthur winners, go HERE.
For tickets to Choir Boy at the Alliance, go HERE.
