Stephen Adly Guirgis and Lynn Nottage

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s most recent play, The Motherf**ker with the Hat, opened on Broadway in 2011. His “characters emerge full-blooded, sparkling with mysterious contradiction,” wrote John Lahr. “If he stays true to his craft, and to his questioning heart, it is my guess that an important new playwright has arrived to help us through these roiling times.” Lynn Nottage’s Ruined won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and her latest play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, ran off-Broadway in 2011. “If there’s a contemporary American playwright who can manage a synthesis between the politics of the kitchen and the ways of the world, it’s Lynn Nottage,” wrote Hilton Als. “She works in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Theodore Dreiser. Like them, she wants to tell big stories about America.”