2005 Heckart Drama Competition Winners

Heckart in The Bad Seed 1956; she was acclaimed in both the Broadway play (1954-55) and the 1956 film, for which she won the Golden Globe award and was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress.

Winners for the second Heckart Drama Competition were announced at the end of July, 2005. Columbus, Ohio, and New York City playwrights tied for the top honors: Janet Overmyer of Columbus and Dan Aibel of New York tied in the full-length category with their plays My Beginning (Overmyer) and Lapses (Aibel). In the one-act category, Katherine Dubois of Boulder, Colorado, won for Innocent Bystanders, while Milwaukee playwright Ludmilla Bollow's ten-minute play, Saving America, was judged the best short play.

Runners-up were Neville J. Bryant (Oakville, Ontario), full-length play, Roses in November; Dori Appel (Ashland, Oregon), first runner-up one act, Alchemy, and Monica Bauer (Lynn, Massachusetts), second runner-up one act, Real Estate. First runner-up in the ten-minute category was Barbara Lindsay of Seattle, Washington, with On the Line, while Elaine Jarvik of Salt Lake City was second runner-up with Dead Right.

Winning plays were given staged readings in August as part of the 2005 Playwrights' Retreat for the International Center for Women Playwrights at Ohio State University in Columbus. Lapses -- in which an aging man becomes confused about reality -- was read on Saturday, August 13th, while My Beginning's reading was on Sunday, August 21st. Overmyer's play follows a recently-widowed woman learning to live on her own--and enjoying it. Innocent Bystanders, Saving America, Alchemy, and On the Line were read on Saturday, August 20th. All readings were in the New Works Lab, the Drake Performance and Event Center, 1149 Cannon Drive.

The Heckart Competition is sponsored by the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University. The writing partnership of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee created such modern classics as Inherit the Wind, Auntie Mame and its hit musical adaptation, Mame, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, and First Monday in October. Lawrence and Lee, both Ohio natives, were active in teaching writing and in encouraging new playwrights during their distinguished careers.

UPDATE: Dan Aibel's Lapses will receive its world premiere production in May, 2007, at the Detroit Repertory Theatre. Details at http://www.detroitreptheatre.com/season.htm

to contact the playwrights:
Dan Aibel's blog is at http://contrapositive.blogspot.com/
Ludmilla Bollow's homepage is http://home.earthlink.net/~bollow/
http://www.stagecraftproductions.net/ to reach Neville Bryant
Dori Appel can be contacted at http://www.geocities.com/doriappel/
Information about Monica Bauer at http://www.bu.edu/bpt/grad/bauer.html
and contact Elaine Jarvik through http://deseretnews.com/dn/staff/card/1,1228,82,00.html

for other contact information, email us at woods.1@osu.edu