Theatre Alumni Receive Prestigious Sloan Commission
Theatre alumni Shayok Misha Chowdhury ’16 and Sam Grabiner ’21 are among the select thirteen playwrights chosen to receive this year’s prestigious Sloan Commission.
Awarded by the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Sloan Playwriting Commission is an annual commission funded by the Sloan Grant, which seeks to encourage emerging and established playwrights to engage with scientific themes in their work. This year, for the second time, the Manhattan Theatre Club will partner with the American Museum of Natural History to present live public readings of excerpts from three of the commissioned projects. Since its inaugural commission in 2000, David Auburn’s Proof, Manhattan Theatre Club has commissioned over 100 productions from a wide array of playwrights, including Sam Hunter,
London-based playwright Grabiner is a graduate of the clown school L’ecole Philippe Gaulier, and writer of the The Verity Bargate Award-winning play, Boys on the Verge of Tears, which will premiere at Soho Theatre in 2024.
“Recently in England cemeteries have been running into issues,” Grabiner said, describing the play he’s writing for the Commission. “Coastal erosion and warm winters have brought bodies, long since buried, up out of the ground. With nowhere to rebury the dead, cemeteries have found themselves with centuries-old skeletons on their hands and no idea what to do with them. The play is set on the East coast of England. We’re in a town hall in a small town where the community has gathered together to make a decision.”
A playwright and director, Chowdhury has had work produced at SoHo Rep and New York Theatre Workshop and is the recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant, the Mark O’Donnell Prize, and the Princess Grace Award. Chowdhury recently directed the world premiere of his play, Public Obscenities, which was a New York Times Critic's Pick. The play was nominated for three Drama League and four Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Direction of a Play.
“As an only child of two physicists, I'm humbled and excited that MTC and the Sloan Foundation are giving me the opportunity to write a science play.” Chowdhury said. “I've always felt awed by the questions my physicist parents ask. They make me feel so big and also impossibly small. The play I'm planning to write, For External Use Only, is about a Bengali-American woman, Shayona, whose father dies unexpectedly of a heart attack on a trip back to India. She blames India for his death, for taking him away from her, and she turns to science as a way of wresting back some semblance of control—of retroactively saving her father’s life. But science, ultimately, can't bring him back. It only unfolds into more questions.”
Manhattan Theatre Club’s Director of Play development, Scott Kaplan, praised the 2023 commissioned playwrights, saying, “We are excited to have commissioned a new class of exceptional artists who represent some of the most thrilling talent working in theater today.”
Read more about the Sloan Initiative and this year's commissioned playwrights here.