New Southern Canon: ASF gathers playwrights for new works on South's transformation

Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Robert Schenkkan is among four prolific playwrights to be commissioned as part of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s ambitious New Southern Canon, a multi-year commitment to developing 22 new plays about transformative moments in the South.

In addition to Schenkkan, the playwrights include: Brooklyn-based playwright-actor Donnetta Lavinia Grays; Lauren Gunderson, one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015; and Afro-Futurist writer Mansa Ra.

“The vision of the Southern Writers Festival is to grow the Southern theater canon with stories steeped in specificity and reflective of the diversity of the region yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” said Rick Dildine, artistic director of ASF. “By telling the stories of our people and dramatizing our shared histories and unique narratives, we give voice to the communities of people who have called the South home for hundreds of years.”

Dildine expanded the scope of ASF’s Southern Writers Project, which originated in 1991 and includes nearly 100 works to date, into a fully realized festival of new works and the largest and most ambitious commissioning program in the South. The enhanced program was announced in 2018 following a regional tour with Dildine and several playwrights, including Grays, to interview residents about the state of the South. The tour included 12 cities across seven states: Alabama (Anniston, Mobile, Montgomery), Arkansas (Elaine); Georgia (Atlanta); Louisiana (New Orleans); Mississippi (Jackson); South Carolina (Columbia, Greenville); Tennessee (Memphis, Nashville, Sewanee).

The newly commissioned work by the four playwrights will be incorporated into the ASF programming beginning in summer 2025. Additional playwrights will be selected in the ensuing years. All of the commissioned work will celebrate the important and lasting changes affecting the South’s people, culture and land.

Robert Schenkkan

“We have a complicated relationship with our history — intensely proud but often highly selective. I look forward to a new canon which offers overlooked narratives while casting a new eye on familiar,” said Schenkkan, who was born in Chapel Hill, N.C. and grew up in Austin, Texas.

A Pulitzer Prize, Tony, and WGA Award winner and a three-time Emmy nominated writer, Schenkkan’s plays include All The Way, The Great Society, The Kentucky Cycle and Building the Wall. For film, he wrote “Hacksaw Ridge” and “The Quiet American.” His Television work includes “All the Way,” and “The Pacific” among others. He is a New Dramatists alum, a member of NTC, the Dramatists Guild Council, the board of The Lillys, and president of The Orchard Project board. He is currently working with director John Doyle on a musical, The 12, a new play for the Portuguese Theater company, Mala Voadora, and a commission at The NY Public Theater.

Donnetta Lavinia Grays

“This is an opportunity to complicate the Southern narrative and extend how the American South is both defined and represented on our stages,” Grays said.  “For me, it means I get to offer something of my own uniquely lived Southern experience — one that is more queer and more progressive than those outside of the South might expect."

Grays is a Brooklyn-based playwright-actor from Columbia, SC. Her plays include Where We Stand, Last Night and the Night Before, Laid to Rest, and The Review or How to Eat Your Opposition, among others. She is a recipient of The Whiting Award for Drama, The Helen Merrill Playwright Award, NTC’s Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Lilly Award, Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award, and the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is also a Lucille Lortel, Drama League and AUDELCO Award nominee. Her commissions include Steppenwolf, Denver Center, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.

Lauren Gunderson

"As a Southern playwright from Decatur, Georgia, it's an incredible honor to be a part of ASF's New Southern Canon. What a gift to be able to tell Southern stories that are particular but universal," Gunderson said.

Gunderson has been one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015, topping the list again in 2023. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for I and You and The Book of Will, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and John Gassner Award for Playwriting, and a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Residency with Marin Theatre Company. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School, where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her musical The Time Traveler’s Wife opens on the West End this October. She lives in San Francisco.

Mansa Ra

“ASF has sustained deep, intentional conversations with audiences all across the American South,” Mansa Ra said, “and I’m excited to be selected as an artist worthy of contributing to their incredibly worthwhile mission. I’m looking forward to sharing my play alongside such accomplished storytellers.”

Ra is an Afro-Futurist writer who brings a soulful new voice to the American Theatre. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. His plays are poetic reflections of Black life in the American South. From his award-winning debut Too Heavy for Your Pocket to his latest play … What the End Will Be which was hailed by The New York Times as “everything that is meant when we say that Black lives matter.” He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

More about ASF

Alabama Shakespeare Festival is a not-for-profit organization under the direction of Artistic Director Rick Dildine and Executive Director Todd Schmidt. As a beloved Alabama arts institution, ASF broadens the cultural identity of the South by producing the classics, Shakespeare, contemporary plays, musicals, theatre for young audiences, and exciting new works. A leader in education and outreach, ASF serves more than 35,000 students annually with artistic programming. ASF is supported by grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information about Alabama Shakespeare Festival, visit ASF.net.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: New Southern Canon: ASF gathers playwrights for new works on South