Each year the winning entry is published by Yale University Press and receives a reading at Yale Repertory Theatre. The respective playwright receives the David C. Horn Prize of $10,000. The reception honoring Coo and a reading of Beautiful Province will take place Sept. 18.
Guare was appointed to succeed David Hare as the judge for the Yale Drama Series. The competition is open to original, unpublished and unproduced full-length English plays.
"The DC HORN Foundation/Yale Drama Series prize for an emerging playwright, received over a thousand entries this year," said playwright Guare. "My readers and I found Beautiful Province by Clarence Coo to be the most successfully realized play. I admired it for its bold theatricality, its daring, its ambitious theme, its consistent tone, its heightened language. The contest searches for a brave new voice in the English-speaking world. We found this year's winner in Clarence Coo's Beautiful Province."
Beautiful Province, according to the Yale Drama Series, "is the story of a road trip across Canada taken by a fifteen year old boy and his French high school teacher."
Runner-ups for the 2012 Yale Drama Series were Saviana Stanescu, for her play Useless, and Jesse Weaver, for his play We Shall Catch Larks. Beautiful Province was developed at the Inkwell's Inkubator Series and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. His other work has been produced or developed at the New York International Fringe Festival, Mu Performing Arts, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Round House Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum, the Young Playwrights Festival, and the Kennedy Center. He was an Allen Lee Hughes Fellow at Arena Stage, a recipient of the Larry Neal Writers' Award, and a social media writer for the 2010 and 2011 Tony Awards. He received his MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University where he studied under Charles Mee, and is currently the program administrator of the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia's School of the Arts.
Submissions for the 2013 Yale Drama Series Award must be postmarked no earlier than June 1, 2012, and no later than August 15, 2012. Visit DCHornFoundation.
