Every year, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park goes searching for a new play upon which to bestow its Macy's New Play Prize for Young Audiences. The winner get a $5,000 commission fee and gets to travel to Cincy a few times during the year to prep the play for a tour. And this year's winner has some substantial local ties: It's Melissa Cooper, whose adaptation of Euripides' Medea took home the top prize. Cooper's version, incidentlally, is called Little Medea, which kind of makes it sound like it should star little kids pretending to be grown-up Greeks -- like, ya know, Bugsy Malone, maybe?
Local theatergoers will, of course, recall Cooper as the former artistic associate at the Dallas Theater Center. She was the co-founder, producer and curator of the Big D Festival of the Unexpected, and during her 15-year run at DTC she wrote and directed many of its more out-there productions, among them last year's celebrated A Macbeth. Cooper's also married to Richard Hamburger, DTC's artistic director till his abrupt resignation announcement last August. --Robert Wilonsky
