Pittsburgh-based playwright Tammy Ryan has been named the inaugural recipient of The Boost, a new commission awarded to a woman, trans or nonbinary playwright over the age of 40, for a play to be written in conversation with Leah Ryan’s play The Wire.
The Leah Ryan Fund was established in 2008 to honor the memory of the late Leah Ryan (no relation to Tammy), a woman of letters who wrote plays, poetry, essays, lyrics and adaptations, and collaborated with performance artists. The fund’s mission is to help “sustain and support writers facing individual challenges and systemic oppression so they can keep writing, connecting, creating and thriving.”
The Leah Fund includes The Leah playwriting prize and The Vladimir, an annual award for writers facing a serious illness. The newly created Boost commission comes with $10,000.
Leah Ryan’s The Wire is about a family of high-wire circus performers. The playwright summed it up as: “You go to sleep, you have a nightmare about being up on the high wire in front of thousands of people. In the dream, you start to fall. Then everyone else starts to fall.”
Tammy Ryan is a widely produced playwright, whose previous honors include the American Theater Critics Association’s Francesca Primus Prize for Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods, and the American Alliance of Theater in Education’s Distinguished New Play Award for The Music Lesson. Ryan is an alumna of Pittsburgh Public Theater‘s Playwrights Collective and a resident playwright of New Dramatists.
She received The Boost commission for her proposed play Tutankhamun or the Last Pharaoh in Queens (working title). The play, set in New York City in 1978 and in the present, will center on the transportation of the King Tut exhibit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Grappling with themes of family, class, race and the collisions between generations, the new play will investigate questions such as: “How do we chase our dreams when the obstacles are so high that we cannot see over the walls that surround us?”
This new work is slated to have a public reading in the spring of 2025.
On receiving the commission, Ryan said, “I am honored to be the inaugural recipient of The Boost and am grateful that the Leah Ryan Fund sees value in supporting women, trans and nonbinary playwrights in mid-career. When we’ve reached an age where we have honed our voices, gained some understanding of our craft and now have the life experience to create our best work, to be ‘boosted’ up in this way can be a game changer. I hope to honor the memory of Leah Ryan with the play that I write and to help create momentum for future recipients of The Boost.”
Arlene Avakian, board member, said, “Like with The Leah, a first in prizes for an emerging woman, trans or nonbinary playwright, The Boost is a first in a commission of its kind as well. We were thrilled when the applications flooded in, and, now, we have a winner – Tammy Ryan – with an amazing project. We look forward to seeing her play in about a year, at which time we will also showcase Leah’s play, The Wire, which we asked to serve as a prompt for proposals for The Boost. Stay tuned.”
The Leah Ryan Fund was established in 2008 to honor the memory of Leah Ryan, a woman of letters who wrote plays, poetry, essays, lyrics, adaptations, and collaborated with performance artists. In 2010 the Fund began giving out its annual prize, The Leah, to encourage and support the work of women, trans, and non-binary playwrights. It is the purpose of the prize to perpetuate the integrity, compassion, and creativity that Leah herself possessed and inspired in others.
This new commission – The Boost – was created to award women, trans, and non-binary playwrights aged 40 or over who have an ongoing practice. The winner will receive a cash award to write a new play in conversation with a work by Leah Ryan. The Board of the Leah Ryan Fund chose Leah’s play The Wire as the prompt for the Boost’s inaugural year.
Learn more about playwright Tammy Ryan at www.tammyryanplays.com, and about The Leah Ryan Fund at https://leahryanfund.org.
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This is great news! Congratulations to our extraordinary Tammy Ryan!