McCarter Theatre Artistic Director Emily Mann Receives 2015 Margo Jones Award

Emily Mann. Photo by Merri Cyr.
Emily Mann. Photo by Merri Cyr.

Emily Mann, McCarter Theatre Center’s artistic director and resident playwright, has been named the recipient of the 2015 Margo Jones Award presented by The Ohio State University Libraries and Ohio State University Department of the Arts and the Humanities.

The award honors people who have demonstrated a significant impact on the craft of playwriting and the theatre.

Mann, a multi-award-winning director and playwright, is celebrating her 25th season as artistic director at McCarter, where she has overseen more than 200 productions. Under her leadership, McCarter accepted the 1994 Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre and the 2013 Tony Award for best new play for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

Recent productions directed at McCarter include Antony and Cleopatra, Proof, A Delicate Balance, and the world premieres of The Convert, The How and the Why,  and Edward Albee’s Me, Myself & I. Notable Broadway productions include A Streetcar Named Desire, Anna in the Tropics, Execution of Justice, and Having Our Say, which Mann wrote and directed, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth. Her most recent project is the East Coast premiere of Rachel Bonds’ Five Mile Lake, opening at McCarter this May.

Mann’s other plays include: Still Life,  Greensboro (A Requiem), Meshugah, Mrs. Packard, and Annulla, An Autobiography. Her adaptations include: Antigone, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull: A Seagull in the Hamptons and The House of Bernarda Alba. Mann’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage premiered this fall at New York Theatre Workshop.

A winner of the Peabody Award, the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, and the Edward Albee Last Frontier Directing Award, Mann is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on its council. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate of arts from Princeton University.

The Margo Jones Award will be presented to Mann at McCarter Theatre Center on May 16th at a ceremony that will include speakers Nadine Strossen, Jade King Carroll, and Christopher Durang.

The award commemorates one of the pioneers of the American professional regional theatre movement. Jones (1912-1955) supported and nurtured new plays at the theatre she founded in Dallas in 1947, including Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams, and Inherit the Wind by Lawrence and Lee. The pattern Jones created for developing new plays is now a standard method for producing new plays in the living American theatre. Among numerous previous recipients are Lucille Lortel, Adrian Hall, Joseph Papp, Jane Alexander, André Bishop, Al Hirschfeld, Ellen Stewart, Mel Gussow, Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, Bill Rauch, Anne Cattaneo and Howard Shalwitz.

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Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.