*

"What do you mean theatre saved your life?" a lady in the audience shouted out to Tarell Alvin McCraney one day last May when he stepped up to receive the first Outstanding Playwright Award ever to be presented by The New York Times.

"Well, literally," he replied softly. "Meaning I was on a wicked, downward spiral, as sometimes happens to kids in the inner city. I grew up in Liberty City, the inner city of Miami. I was very depressed, I felt self-destructive, and no one could really reach inside and get me out of myself. Then I joined this improv troupe in Miami where we would do rehab theatre for people in rehabilitation centers and detention centers. One day, when we were doing a scene, a woman in the audience stopped the show because what we were doing spoke to them in a real way they'd never felt before.

"The irony of it was not lost on me that this was the same rehab center my mother had been in a year before. There were women who knew my mother then. It was not lost on me that these women said they finally understood what their drug abuse was doing to their children while they were on drugs. Someone gave them a chance to see that. And so I thought to myself, 'Well, maybe I could have saved my mother's life, had I tried harder or gotten there sooner.' From that moment, I said, 'I have something to do. I have work to do.' It saved me from thinking I had no place to be."

It has been a rough, relentless swim to a safe harbor for this gay, African-American, 29-year-old playwright, but along the way, various institutions have tossed him life preservers in award form to keep him afloat in the choppy waters of showbiz. In addition to the New York Times prize, he won 2009's Steinberg Playwright Award, the London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Whiting Writing Award and the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition prize from Atlanta's Alliance Theatre.

"What? No Pulitzer?" you ask. Give the boy time. He just got out of Yale School of Drama's M.F.A. playwriting program. If anything, he deserves an award for the Best-Kept Secret in Contemporary Theatre, having so far made only two modest Off-Broadway forays here — Wig Out!, a flamboyant drag-ball frenzy at the Vineyard last year, and The Brothers Size, a sibling collision at the Public the year before. Continued...