TCG PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE RECIPIENTS
OF THE 2007 TCG AWARDS
New York, May 2007 - Since 2001 the TCG Awards have saluted extraordinary contributions to the American theatre community,
and Theatre Communications Group (TCG) looks forward to continuing this tradition when the awards are presented on June 9,
2007, during the Closing Ceremonies of the National Conference in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN.
Each TCG member theatre was given the opportunity to nominate one honoree in each award category and a committee of TCG's
board of directors selected the award recipients from the pool of nominees. This year the TCG Awards will be presented in
six categories in recognition of sustained and exemplary service to the field.
The 2007 TCG Award categories and recipients are:
Regional Funder Award - St. Paul Travelers
Foundation Award - Nathan
Cummings Foundation
Corporate Award - Humana Inc.
Theatre Practitioner(s) Award - Luis
Valdez and Liz LeCompte
Peter Zeisler Memorial Award - The Foundry Theatre
Alan Schneider
Director Award - Joel Sass
St. Paul Travelers
The 2007 TCG Regional Funder Award recognizes a local funding organization that has evidenced leadership
and provided sustained outstanding support of theatre(s) in the region in which the TCG conference is being held, and will
be presented to St. Paul Travelers. Previous recipients of this award include the Jerome Foundation of St. Paul (MN), ArtsFund
of Seattle (WA) and Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund of Atlanta (GA).
Travelers' giving program and foundation of the company gave approximately $15 million charitably last year through two
foundations and the corporate giving program.
Travelers focuses on three giving priorities: Arts/Culture, Education, and Community Development. In 2006, 19% of its giving
budget went to funding in Arts and Culture, specifically Arts/Diversity and Arts Education. Travelers takes pride in the work
of its Arts and Diversity Committee, a group of 15 employees who actively extend the giving of the company through their volunteer
partnerships with arts organizations throughout the Twin Cities. For many years, Travelers has taken great pride in supporting
small, medium, and large arts organizations of various disciplines.
St. Paul Travelers Foundation has a strong interest in supporting arts education programs, recognizing the impact of arts
curricula in the public schools. Other project support tends to be given to help fund specific plays and performances. St.
Paul Travelers also offers in-kind and sponsorships in addition to its charitable contributions. The company is viewed as
an innovative and open funder of the arts, and TCG's staff has found the foundation very approachable and easy to work with.
St. Paul Travelers Foundation has recently supported the following theatres in the Twin Cities area: Alchemy Theater, Illusion
Theater, In the Heart of the Beast, Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Mu Performing Arts, Ordway
Center for the Performing Arts, Pangea World Theater, Park Square Theatre Company, Penumbra Theatre Company, SteppingStone
Theatre, Teatro Del Pueblo, Ten Thousand Things Theater Company, The Children's Theater Company, The Guthrie Theater, The
History Theatre and Theatre de la Jeune Lune.
Nathan Cummings Foundation
The 2007 TCG Foundation Award recognizes a foundation that has evidenced leadership and provided sustained
national outstanding support of theatre in America, and will be presented to the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Previous recipients
in this category include the Shubert Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and
the Wallace Foundation.
The Nathan Cummings Foundation seeks to build a socially and economically just society that values nature and protects
the ecological balance for future generations; promotes humane health care; and fosters arts and culture that enriches communities.
The Nathan Cummings Foundation's Arts and Culture Program works to support artistic practices, programs and policies that
encourage cross-cultural and multidisciplinary collaborations, and give voice to the issues and experiences of underrepresented
communities, in order to build a stronger society. The funding priorities acknowledge the roles that artists and cultural
workers play in stimulating social change and championing economic justice in both traditional and non-traditional venues.
By addressing art through the lens of social justice, the program affirms artists and arts institutions that value and encourage
creativity, innovation and risk-taking while fostering cross-cultural conversations that transcend race, ethnicity, class,
age and geography. The foundation also supports private, public and corporate policies that benefit artists, arts organizations
and constituent communities; as well as cross-disciplinary strategies that align the arts community with others with similar
or complimentary interests.
Humana
The 2007 TCG Corporate Award, recognizing a small, midsize or large company that has evidenced national
leadership and provided sustained outstanding support of theatre(s) in America, will be presented to Humana. Previous recipients
in this category include Target, AT&T and Altria.
The Humana Foundation was established in 1981 as the philanthropic arm of Humana Inc., one of the nation's leading health
benefits companies. The Foundation is located in Louisville, Kentucky, the site of Humana's corporate headquarters. The Humana
Foundation supports and nurtures charitable activities that promote healthy lives and healthy communities. From its inception,
Co-founders David A. Jones and the late Wendell Cherry have made the arts an integral part of Humana's culture. Since 1975,
the company has contributed more than $40 million to the arts in Louisville, as well as around the country.
Humana's sponsorship of Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays began in 1979 and has
since provided more than $16.4 million in continued support. Humana's 30-plus years of support is believed to be the longest
running corporate sponsorship of a performing arts organization in the United States.
The 31st annual Humana Festival of New American Plays ended April 7, 2007, and featured ten premieres by emerging
and established playwrights. The Festival draws more than 26,000 patrons annually, and an estimated 90 million people worldwide
have seen a play that originated at the Festival. Three - D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game, Beth Henley's Crimes of the
Heart and Donald Margulies' Dinner with Friends -- have won Pulitzer Prizes. Several other Humana Festival plays
have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes. Additionally, six Humana plays have won the American Theatre Critics Award, and four
plays have won an Obie Award. In 2004, Variety acknowledged the Humana Festival as "the leading showcase of new American works
for the theatre."
In addition, the company has supported the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and theatres in Chicago, Austin, Kansas City,
Phoenix, San Antonio, Sarasota, and Washington D.C., and organizations such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Americans for
the Arts, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, American Symphony Orchestra, Museum of Modern Art and The New York
Philharmonic.
Luis Valdez and Elizabeth LeCompte
The 2007 TCG Theatre Practitioner Award recognizes an individual artist or administrator
- institutionally affiliated or unaffiliated - whose work in the American theatre has evidenced exemplary achievement over
time and who has contributed significantly to the development of the larger field. This
award will be presented to Luis Valdez and Liz LeCompte. The Theatre Practitioner Award was originally given in a previous
form as the Zeisler Award. Previous recipients include Woodie King, Jr., Zelda Fichandler, Lloyd Richards, Ming Cho Lee, Ellen
Stewart, Maria Irene Fornes, Wiliam Swetland, Sara O'Connor, Ruth Maleczech, John Conklin and Peter Culman.
Luis Valdez is regarded as one of the most important and influential American playwrights living today.
He founded the internationally renowned, Obie Award winning theatre company, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers' Theater)
in 1965 in the heat of the United Farm Workers (UFW) struggle. It is the longest running Chicano theatre in the United States.
His involvement with Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the early Chicano Movement left an indelible mark on his work even after he
left the UFW in 1967, including his early actos Las Dos Caras del Patroncito and Quinta Temporada (short plays
written to encourage campesinos to leave the fields and join the UFW); his mitos (mythic plays) Bernabe and La Carpa
de los Rasquachi; his examinations of Chicano urban life in I Don't Have to Show You No Stinkin' Badges; his re-visioning
of classic Mexican folktales in Corridos; his exploration of his own Indigenous Yaqui roots in Mummified Deer and
Zoot Suit, the first Chicano play on Broadway and the first Chicano major feature film.
Valdez's numerous feature film and television credits include La Bamba starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Cisco Kid
starting Jimmy Smits and Cheech Marin and Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution starring Linda Ronstadt. His latest
anthology Mummified Deer and Other Plays was recently published by Arte Público Press. Valdez has taught at many universities
and was on the founding faculty at California State University, Monterey Bay.
He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including his alma mater, San Jose State University.
Valdez's hard work and long creative career have won him countless awards including numerous LA Drama Critics Awards, Dramalogue
Awards, Bay Area Critics Awards, the prestigious George Peabody Award for excellence in television, the Presidential Medal
of the Arts, the Governor's Award for the California Arts Council, and Mexico's prestigious Águila Azteca Award given to individuals
whose work promotes cultural excellence and exchange between the US and Mexico. In April, 2007, Valcez was inducted into the
College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Elizabeth LeCompte is a founding member of The Wooster Group. Since 1975, LeCompte has constructed, with
the members and associates of The Wooster Group, eighteen multimedia theater pieces, including the trilogy Three Places
in Rhode Island, consisting of Sakonnet Point (1975), Rumstick Road (1977), and Nayatt School (1978);
the epilogue to the trilogy, Point Judith (1979); a second trilogy, The Road to Immortality, consisting of Route
1 & 9 (1981/1987), L.S.D. (...Just the High Points...) (1984), and Frank Dell's The Temptation of
St. Antony (1987); North Atlantic (1984/1999); Brace Up! (1991/2003), based on Paul Schmidt's translation
of Chekhov's Three Sisters; Fish Story (1994); The Emperor Jones (1993/2006) and The Hairy Ape
(1995) by Eugene O'Neill; House/Lights (1999/2005), based on Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights;
To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre) (2002), from the play by Jean Racine; Poor Theater (2004); Who's Your Dada?! (2006),
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to close its Dada exhibition; Hamlet (2007), by William Shakespeare; and the
opera La Didone (2007) by Francesco Cavalli and Giovan Francesco Busenello.
LeCompte and The Wooster Group have created seven film, video and DVD works and choreographed four short dance pieces.
She and TWG were recently commissioned to create an installation for the 2008 opening of the Experimental Media and Performing
Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her numerous honors and awards include a NEA Distinguished Artists Fellowship
for Lifetime Achievement in American Theater, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from
the French Ministry of Culture.
The Foundry Theatre
The 2007 Peter Zeisler Memorial Award r ecognizes an individual or organization whose work exemplifies
innovative or untraditional practices, who is dedicated to freedom of expression and has not yet been recognized in the national
field for this work. 2006 was the inaugural year for the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, given in tribute to the late executive
director of TCG, Peter Zeisler, and it was presented to Will Power.
Established in 1994 by producing artistic director Melanie Joseph and board member Cornel West, The Foundry Theatre aspires
to assemble a community of artists with revolutionary ideas for the theatre and the world in which it is situated. Now an
artistic producing collective that includes co-producers Anne Erbe and Sunder Ganglani, The Foundry Theatre is an ongoing
performance of ideas - created by new theatre works and public dialogue events - which invite as many people as possible to
consider what it means to be citizens of a world that must be changed.
The Foundry Theatre commissions, develops and premieres new works, collaborating on their long-term development with various
ensembles of artists. Among their productions are works by Kirk Lynn (Major Bang), Carl Hancock Rux (Talk),
Alice Tuan (The Roaring Girle), Rinde Eckert (And God Created Great Whales), W. David Hancock (Deviant Craft;
The Race of the Ark Tattoo; The Convention of Cartography) and Moscow's Kama Ginkas (K.I. From Crime).
The Foundry Theatre productions continue to tour nationally and internationally and have been honored with 8 Obie Awards
and 3 Drama Desk nominations for unique theatrical experience. In addition, The Foundry Theatre hosts public dialogues which
regularly bring artists together with thinkers in other fields to investigate the social and political workings of a changing
polis. These events in tandem with their artistic output were recognized with a special Obie Award in 2001, citing the company
for "creating new, envelope-pushing work and taking on some of the thorniest issues of the world we inhabit."
Joel Sass
The 2007 Alan Schneider Director Award, designed to identify and assist exceptional directors whose talent
has been demonstrated through work in specific regions, but who are not yet known nationally , will be awarded to Joel Sass.
Previous recipients of this award have been Michael John Garcés, Nancy Keystone, Darko Tresnjak, Henry Godinez, Roman Paska,
Mark Brokaw, Charles Newell, David Saint, Roberta Levitow, Kyle Donnelly, Peter C. Brosius and Mary Robinson.
Joel Sass is a stage director, designer and adapter specializing in new work for the stage and imaginative treatments of
classic plays. His directing credits include Pericles (Guthrie Theatre), Lettice and Lovage (Theatre de la Jeune
Lune), I Am My Own Wife (The Jungle Theater), and many productions as artistic director for the award-winning Minneapolis-based
Mary Worth Theatre Company including Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's R & J, Crazyface, Valley of the Dolls, History
of the Devil, and others. Joel was named Best Director-2002 by the Twin Cities theatre critics, and Mary Worth was named
Best Independent Theatre Company-2003. For three seasons, he was resident assistant director at Theatre de la Jeune Lune,
where he worked on numerous world premieres including Children of Paradise and The Ballroom.
He is a recipient of the McKnight Theatre Artist Fellowship in directing, an Ameriprise IVEY Award for scenic design, numerous
grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and the Alan Schneider Directing Award. Current projects include Shining
City for the Jungle Theatre, Nine Parts of Desire at the Guthrie, and the development of two new works: Cowboy
Hamlet, a rockabilly song cycle set within a dirt-floored rodeo ring; and a new meditation on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
which unfolds during the American Civil War.
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Theatre Communications Group (TCG) , the national organization for the American theatre, offers a wide
array of services in line with its mission: to strengthen, nurture and promote the professional not-for-profit American theatre.
Artistic programs support theatres and theatre artists by awarding approximately $3 million in grants annually, and offer
career development programs for artists. Management programs provide professional development opportunities for theatre leaders
through workshops, conferences, forums and publications, as well as industry research on the finances and practices of the
American not-for-profit theatre. Advocacy , conducted in conjunction with the dance, presenting, opera and symphony orchestra
fields, includes guiding lobbying efforts and providing theatres with timely alerts about legislative developments. As the
country's leading independent press specializing in dramatic literature, TCG's publications include American Theatre magazine,
the ArtSEARCH employment bulletin, plays, translations and theatre reference books . As the U.S. Center of UNESCO's
International Theatre Institute , a worldwide network, TCG supports cross-cultural exchange through travel grants and other
assistance to traveling theatre professionals. Through these programs, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency
of its member theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field, and promote a larger public
understanding of and appreciation for the theatre field. TCG serves over 460 member theatres nationwide.
