Ian Cohen's Bertrand Priest Wins Kaufman & Hart Comedy Prize

By Robert Simonson
18 May 2006

Bertrand Priest, a new play by Ian Cohen about a writer and his muse, has won the 2006 Kaufman & Hart Prize for New American Comedy.

The biennial playwriting award is given out by Arkansas Repertory Theatre, and carries with it a $10,000 cash prize and the prospect of a staged reading at Arkansas Repertory Theatre and a fully mounted production on the theatre's MainStage April 27-May 13, 2007.

Finalists were Nicholas Korn, author of The Antic in Romantic, a modern-day commedia, and Kenneth N. Kurtz, author of Merde De Canard: A Comedy of Seven Doors and Eight Automatons, a farce. Honorable mention was given to Richard Gleaves, author of Oswald on Ice, a black comedy involving Lee Harvey Oswald's undertaker. As finalists, both Korn and Kurtz will receive $1,000 and staged readings of their scripts.

Readings of The Antic in Romantic, Merde De Canard and Bertrand Priest, are scheduled for July 28-30, 2006, respectively, on The Rep's SecondStage.

The Kaufman & Hart Prize, named, of course, for George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, was created "to acknowledge and encourage the development of new comedies for the stage." The first Kaufman & Hart Prize was awarded in 2002.