AWARDEES

LOS ANGELES NEW PLAY PROJECT CELEBRATES ITS 2023 GRANT RECIPIENTS

Winning playwrights and producers of the LANPP 2023 theater production grants came together in October to celebrate the new winning plays to be produced in the coming year. 

Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play, HAPPY FALL: A Queer Stunt Spectacular, will be produced by Rogue Artists Ensemble after a successful workshop which took place earlier this year.  

HAPPY FALL, based on true-life stories and direct testimonies, illuminates issues of racial and cultural identity in Hollywood. Set for a full premiere in 2024, it will come to life as an interactive stunt show, with life-size puppets and elaborate production. 

Dring is an Emmy nominated writer, also a recipient of the PLAY LA Stage Raw/Humanitas Prize. She has been a finalist for the Relentless Award, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and the O’Neill Playwrights Conference.  

www.lisasanayedring.com

FOUR WOMEN IN RED written by Laura Annawyn Shamas to be produced by Victory Theater Сenter, centers around a group of Native American women who search for and mourn Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW), one of three plays submitted this year to LANPP that focuses on this serious issue.  

Laura Annawyn Shamas, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, was born in Oklahoma, and lives in Los Angeles. FOUR WOMEN IN RED was part of the 2022 Festival of New Plays at Native Voices at the Autry. In addition, a monologue from the play was published in the Smith and Kraus anthology: 2022 – Best Women’s Stage Monologues. In 2021, Shamas was part of the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at Oregon Shakespeare Festival; they generously supported the initial dramaturgy for the full-length version of FOUR WOMEN IN RED. She’s written forty plays and is currently writing a novel.

www.laurashamas.com 

LANPP is honored to support our selected playwrights and producers and their exceptional work, and additionally acknowledges overall the outstanding works submitted that we were not able to single out this year.