As a recipient of the award, Radiohole will receive a fully produced run at PS 122 during the 2009-2010 season and a stipend to create the work. The Award was created in Gray's honor by Performance Space 122, Gray's widow Kathleen Russo, UCLA Live and The Walker Arts Center, where the commission will also be presented. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh also serves as a partner in the award.
Founded by Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman and Scott Halverson Gillette in 1998, Radiohole presented Fluke at PS 122 in 2006 and has also created the works Anger/Nation, Radiohole Is Still My Name, None of It (more or less Hudson's Bay, Again), Bend Your Mind Off, Rodan (a jive hummer), A History of Heen (not Francis E. Dec, Esquire) and Bender.
The announcement was made following the PS 122 performance of the National Theater of the United States of America's Chatauqua!, which was the second recipient of the Spalding Gray Award. Russo and her son, Theo Grey, were on hand for the announcement.
The Spalding Gray Award, according to press notes, "supports gifted writer/performers who fully realize both aspects of Spalding's legacy, who are fearless innovators of theatrical form, who reach into daily experience and create resonant, transcendent work that makes us all bigger, wider, wiser and, somehow, more than we were when we entered the theater."
The Award Committee comprises PS 122 artistic director Vallejo Gantner, Philip Bither of the Walker Arts Center, Ben Harrison of the Warhol Museum and Kathleen Russo. For further information visit PS122.