The award is named for Tony Award-winning playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents (West Side Story, Gypsy, Home of the Brave) and his late partner, Tom Hatcher. The award is one of the most generous in the sphere of playwriting and is the first major playwriting distinction to be named after a gay couple.

The New York Times first reported the news of Talbott's honor.

Talbott, who played David Frost in the U.S. regional premiere of Frost/Nixon and appeared on Broadway in the revival of Sly Fox, will receive a $50,000 cash award, and MCC will receive $100,000 in funds to subsidize production costs for the Off-Broadway premiere of The Submission. It will mark Talbott's professional playwriting debut.

MCC has not announced dates of production at this time. The Laurents-Hatcher Award is presented annually for an unproduced, full-length play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright.

Talbott, 46, a native of western Nebraska, has been a New York City-based actor since 1996, when he earned an MFA in acting from Yale School of Drama. A working actor and unproduced playwright, he penned For Nate and Molly and Tender, plays seen in the student Yale Cabaret. His recent plays include twelve twenty-five, about a man dealing with his father's Alzheimer's Disease, and the impact it has on his family of friends; and Elliot Yagovich, a dark workplace comedy about what may be brewing in the mind and heart of the co-worker in the cubicle next door. He also co-wrote Critical Moment, a two-hander, with 2010 Tony nominee Stephen Kunken. Under the title Festival Play, The Submission was a semi-finalist for the 2010 O'Neill Playwrights Conference.