Playwright Tarell McCraney is a MacArthur Fellow

Tarell McCraney

Tarell McCraney is now among MacArthur Fellows for the Class of 2013, congratulations!

Unlike some of the other winners who have university or other professional appointments, McCraney is an independent writer with a peripatetic schedule involving Chicago, New York (where he has a close relationship with the New York Public Theater) and the United Kingdom. In the interview, he said he does not currently have a permanent residence but has been living where his commissions have dictated. That may change now.

“This is surreal,” McCraney said from London, where he currently is working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It won’t make sense to me until other people know. But I am thinking this will be, for me, focus money. It will allow me to focus, instead of trying to do so many projects at once.”

Reference:  Steppenwolf ensemble member receives MacArthur Fellowship.

I pursued the director position for this fellowship early last year, and along the way I learned that the nomination and selection of winners are a highly secretive process.  No one in the public can nominate anyone, but rather nominees are picked by an unidentified committee.

Colloquially known as a “genius grant,” the $625,000 fellowship (given over five years with no strings attached) is offered by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation.

Writer Chris Jones describes the award perfectly well.  Last year, though, it was $500,000, so the Foundation has sweetened the pot.

Four years ago I sketched a five-act, multimedia play, focused on housemaid abuse.  I was living in Dubai, then, and suffice it to say for now, it was very much an issue, especially for the Filipino community.  It's a massive five-project initiative that ultimately deals with all forms of domestic violence and neglect.  Besides the five-act play, I have a feature-length film, a photography-poetry exhibit, an animation film, and an advocacy initiative in mind.

With this, and other projects I have cooking under Dr. Ron Art, I would certainly love to have that focus money that McCraney speaks of.

Tarell Alvin McCraney is a playwright exploring the rich diversity of the African American experience in works that imbue the lives of ordinary people with epic significance. Complementing his poetic, intimate language with a musical sensibility and rhythmic, often ritualistic movement, McCraney transforms intentionally minimalist stages into worlds marked by metaphor and imagery.

His most well-known works, a triptych collectively titled The Brother/Sister Plays (2009), weave West African Yoruban cosmology into modern-day stories of familial self-sacrifice, unrequited love, and coming of age. The audience becomes an essential part of the story as the characters speak their stage directions and inner feelings directly to the viewers. In Head of Passes (2013) and Choir Boy (2012), McCraney draws on themes that run throughout the Book of Job and traditional spirituals, respectively, to explore the role of faith and tradition in two very different close-knit worlds. Head of Passes, set in the isolated marshlands of the Mississippi River Delta, dramatizes a matriarch’s struggle to maintain her faith as her world literally falls apart around her. In Choir Boy, students at an elite boarding school remain united in their dedication to performing traditional spirituals even as they navigate the fraught nature of adolescent self-expression. 

In addition to writing new works, McCraney is committed to bringing theatre to elementary and secondary school students, particularly in underserved communities in his hometown of Miami. His ninety-minute adaptation of Hamlet (2010), an intense, condensed version of the play set within a contemporized historical context, employs a visually explosive, expressive staging that engages audiences of all ages, whether or not they have a previous familiarity with Shakespeare. In telling stories that are simultaneously contemporary and universal, McCraney is demonstrating to new and younger audiences the ability of theatre to evoke a sense of our shared humanity and emerging as an important voice in American theatre.

Reference:  Tarell McCraney.