This year’s Obie Awards ceremony featured awards for Theatre for a New Audience, director Arin Arbus, actor Kecia Lewis, and designer Riccardo Hernandez.
Theatre for a New Audience received The Ross Wetzsteon Award for “exceptional enterprise in its approach to classics or in creating innovative new work.” Arin Arbus received an Obie Award for her direction of The Skin of Our Teeth. Kecia Lewis received an Obie Award for her performances in Theatre for a New Audience’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Marie and Rosetta at Atlantic Theatre. Riccardo Hernandez, scenic designer of The Skin of Our Teeth and many previous TFANA productions, received an Obie Award for “Sustained Excellence in Set Design.” Theatre for a New Audience congratulates these incredible artists on their awards.
Click Here to view the full list of winners.
In presenting The Ross Wetzsteon Award to Theatre for a New Audience, presenter Taylor Mac said, “Every year since 1998, the Obie judges have honored the memory of Ross Wetzsteon, beloved Voice editor and long-time Obie Awards chairman, by giving an award in his name to a theatre that has demonstrated exceptional enterprise in its approach to classics or in creating innovative new work. Over in Brooklyn, in a spacious new theatre lives a company that’s been making a special kind of theatrical magic for over 35 years. The production history page on their website says that in their early years, they produced “Shakespeare and other new plays,” and that’s exactly right, because they put the classics they produce in an astonishing new light, bringing us Ibsen and Strindberg, or Shakespeare and Marlowe, in alternating rep, with Thornton Wilder and Adrienne Kennedy in between. Julie Taymor made magic for them half a dozen times, most recently with A Midsummer Night’s Dream... For daring, for enterprise, for making Shakespeare seem new and exciting, the judges have voted the Ross Wetzsteon Award to THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE.“