We are pleased to announce the 2022 Association for Mormon Letters Awards finalists in Drama. That is, for theatrical works. The final awards will be announced and presented on April 29, as part of the 2023 Association for Mormon Letters Virtual Conference. The finalists and winners are chosen by juries of authors, academics, and critics. The announcements include plot summaries of the plays and creator biographies, usually adapted from the playwright and theater websites.
Drama
Bekah Brunstetter (book) and Cinco Paul (story, music, and lyrics). A. D. 16. Olney Theatre Center, Olney, Maryland, Feb-March.
What if your first crush really was perfect? From the comic genius of Cinco Paul (Despicable Me and the musical hit Schmigadoon) and Bekah Brunstetter (This Is Us) comes the delightfully witty, sublimely inspiring story of teenaged Mary Magdalene, who falls in love with the carpenter’s son next door… who happens to be a kid named Jesus. In her quest to impress him, Mary has to fend off a trio of 1st-Century Mean Girls and a bunch of Beastie Boys-inspired wiseguys from the Sanhedrin. She learns that getting Jesus to love you back is both easier – and harder – than she ever imagined. With a lush R&B score (that evokes the best of TLC, En Vogue, Prince and more) and a riotous cast of characters, A.D. 16 achieves the rare feat of being both funny and sincere. A thrilling and fun musical for people of all faiths, or no faith at all. (See also this Washington Post review)
Cinco Paul is a screenwriter best known for his long resume of blockbuster family films which he co-wrote alongside Ken Daurio, including Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, Despicable Me 3, Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who, Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, and The Secret Life Of Pets, among others. Most recently he co-created and was the showrunner for Apple TV Plus’ Schmigadoon!, for which he also wrote all the songs (garnering him a Grammy nomination for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media). Other upcoming projects include the stop-motion animation holiday special homage Winter Wonderland from Imagine and Warner Bros., and the horror-comedy This Sucks.
Bekah Brunstetter: As a TV writer and producer, she has written for Switched at Birth, American Gods, This is Us, and Maid. As a playwright, her work has been staged and developed by The O’Neill Playwright’s conference, the Atlantic Theater, Portland Center Stage, The Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse, Naked Angels, South Coast Repertory, The Echo theater, and Ojai Playwright’s conference. Her play The Cake has been produced over 80 times worldwide, as ran off Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club.
Julie Jensen. Mother, Mother: The Many Mothers of Maude. Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City, November. Pygmalion Productions.
Annie Adams, born in Utah and a favorite of Brigham Young, is driven by ambition to pursue a career on the stage. She plays mining camps in the west and tawdry theatres throughout the country until she finally arrives in New York City, where it is her daughter, Maude Adams, who becomes the most celebrated actress in America, if not the world, at the turn of the century. She was especially known for playing Peter Pan. Martha Hughes Cannon, another famous Utahn who was a physician, polygamist and the first woman in the U.S. to be elected a state senator, is also a character. This is a play about dreams and disappointments, a story of what happens when reality collides with desire. It is also a play that rejoices in the humor and absurdity of the theater itself.
Julie Jensen has been writing plays for more than 30 years. More than two dozen of her plays have been professionally produced, including Two-Headed, Last Lists of My Mad Mother, Dust Eaters, WAIT!, The Harvey Girls and Mockingbird. Her work has won a dozen awards, among them the Kennedy Center Award for New American Plays, the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work, the LA Weekly Award for Best New Play, the Edgerton Foundation’s New American Plays Award and the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award. She has taught playwriting at five universities, directed a graduate program in playwriting and published a book on the craft titled Playwriting, Brief & Brilliant. C
Melissa Leilani Larson. Mestiza, or Mixed. Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, June.
Lark Timon is no stranger to failure; it’s loomed large throughout her filmmaking career. Plagued by debt and professional disappointment, Lark chances upon a potentially career-changing opportunity only to be confronted by questions about her art, her relationships and her identity as a queer mestiza. Larks’s Utah family is mixed Filipino/White, which plays into her questions about belonging and being American. Featuring the first majority-Filipino cast in Utah history.
Melissa Leilani Larson is a writer based in Salt Lake City. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She has won four AML Drama Awards, for Little Happy Secrets (2009), Pride and Prejudice (2014), Pilot Program (2015), and Mountain Law (2020), and was awarded the 2018 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. Other produced plays include: Martyrs’ Crossing, A Flickering, Lady in Waiting, The Weaver of Raveloe, The Edible Complex, Persuasion, Sweetheart Come, and Bitter Lemon. Little Happy Secrets and Pilot Program were published together in a book titled Third Wheel (2017). Her produced screenplays include Jane and Emma and Freetown, both of which were AML Film Award finalists. She was a contributing writer to the LDS Church History Department’s Saints series.
Reed McColm. The Wrong People Have Money. Varscona Theatre, Alberta, October-November. Shadow Theatre.
Comedy. Popular York University professor Martin Delancey is challenged by a wealthy consortium of investors to conduct a serious study into the feasibility of an “impossible” suggestion he raises in his classroom: Is it possible to move the country of Greenland, in its entirety, south in the Atlantic, thereby bringing the planet a newly habitable land mass? Delancey and his team encounter myriad obstacles in that study, but also increasingly excited worldwide interest, which may just turn a wild idea into a major business opportunity. A romp through academics, finance, politics, and the media.
Reed McColm is an Emmy award-winning screenwriter and playwright, as well as an actor, producer, and artistic director. He has written for or worked on television shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Growing Pains, and Wings, and has an Emmy Award for his work on the 1988 ABC After-School Special, Set Straight on Bullies. He wrote the comic play Together Again for the First Time, which he later produced as an independent film. He won an AML Drama Award in 2002 for his play Hole in the Sky. He co-produced the TV movie Cab to Canada. He is a native of Edmonton, Alberta.