Tony Kushner to Receive TFANA’s Scripps Award

Pultizer Prize winner Tony Kushner will receive the 2006 Samuel H. Scripps Award tonight at Theatre for a New Audience’s annual gala at the Museum of Natural History. Noted author Harold Bloom will present the award.

During the event, TFANA is expected to disclose more details about its 2006-2007 season. Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham will star in two of the company’s three plays. He will play the title role in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the latter production will be seen in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival in London following its New York run. TFANA’s season will conclude with Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, a co-production with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachussetts. The company is currently presenting Howard Brenton’s Sore Throats at the Duke on 42nd Street.

Kushner received the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Angels in America. His other works include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs, Homebody/Kabul, and the musical Caroline, or Change. He is currently represented Off-Broadway by his adaptation of the 1930s Czech children’s opera Brundibar, which is paired with his new one-act But the Giraffe. This year, Kushner was an Academy Award nominee his co-authorship of the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich.