Jackie Sibblies Drury Wins 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fairview

Playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury has received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Fairview. The Pulitzers describe the play as follows: "A hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors' community to face deep-seated prejudices."

In Fairview, the Frasier family is gearing up for Grandma's birthday, and Beverly needs this dinner to be perfect. Plus, the radio's on the fritz, her sister Jasmine is drinking, her husband Dayton isn't helping, her brother Tyrone might not show up at all, and her daughter Keisha is being a typical teenager. As Beverly's hostess-neurosis begins to get the better of her while her family acts like family, Keisha's adolescent malaise starts to seem like maybe it could be something else. Fairview ran at Soho Rep. in the summer of 2018 and will be seen later this year as a return engagement at Theatre for a New Audience.

Finalists for this year's Pulitzer for Drama were Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, currently running on Broadway, and Clare Barron's Dance Nation, which ran last summer at Playwrights Horizons.

What the Constitution Means to Me was described by the committee as follows: "A charming and incisive analysis of gender and racial biases inherent to the U.S. Constitution that examines how this living document could evolve to fit modern America."

Dance Nation's description reads: "A refreshingly unorthodox play that conveys the joy and abandon of dancing, while addressing the changes to body and mind of its preteen characters as they peer over the precipice toward adulthood."