Playwriting alumnus Sam Grabiner ’21 is the recipient of the Verity Bargate Award for 2022. Grabiner’s play, Boys on the Verge of Tears, was selected after an extensive consideration process that included nearly 1,500 submissions, which were condensed into a longlist of 17 plays, followed by a shortlist of six.
The Verity Bargate Award, the playwriting award of London’s Soho Theatre, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Soho Theatre, a trio of theatre venues and a registered charity, focuses on new theatre, comedy, and cabaret in London; the novelist and theatre director, Verity Bargate (1940-1981), was one of its founders. The award in her honor aims to highlight the work of new or up-and-coming playwrights and includes a prize of £7,500 and a full production of the winning play at Soho Theatre. The production company Character 7 sponsors the award.
Boys on the Verge of Tears is a play about the repercussions of spending a life “performing masculinity.” Set in a men’s public restroom, the characters drift in and out as they go about their business. The men’s room is a space in which male-identifying characters of all walks of life converge: a father potty-trains his son, teenagers skip school, and drunken fights break out. From this shared space emerges a story of shame, violence, and vulnerability. Chapter 7’s Stephen Garrett, chair of the Verity Bargate Award’s judging panel, praised Grabiner as a worthy winner and said that Grabiner has crafted “an eerily zeitgeisty seven ages of man” in Boys on the Verge of Tears. “It’s a play that effortlessly switches from the laugh out loud funny to the troublingly dark. It manages to be prescient, provocative, upsetting, violent, and tender without ever leaving the simplest of settings, a men’s toilet.”
Sam Grabiner is a playwright from London. His play, Next Year in Jerusalem!, won the Columbia@Roundabout’s New Play Reading Series in 2020 and was a 2021 finalist for The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. Another of his plays, Neptune, was shortlisted for the 2019 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting. Grabiner is a resident playwright at Papatango Theatre Company. He has completed residencies at the Bush Theatre in London and is a graduate of The Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Programme. In addition to his work as a playwright, Grabiner helps run Pelican, a high-energy, physical comedy-based theatre company. He is a graduate of the clown school Ecole Philippe Gaulier.
