Marisa Wegrzyn wins Wasserstein playwriting prize

For the second time in its three-year existence, the Wasserstein Prize—named for the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein—has chosen a Chicago winner. Marisa Wegrzyn was announced this morning as the winner of the 2009 prize, established after Wasserstein's death in 2006 and awarded each year to a female playwright "who has not yet received national attention." The award comes with a $25,000 stipend; it's "intended for a writer to whom $25,000 will make a substantial difference in her professional life," according to TDF, which administered the award for the first time this year. (That's pretty much every writer I know. But I digress.) Wegrzyn's script Hickorydickory was chosen as the winner by a panel of Wasserstein's friends that included Lincoln Center Theater artistic director Andre Bishop, actress Alma Cuervo, entrepreneur Yscaira Jimenez, playwright Bruce Norris (whose new play A Parallelogram premieres at Steppenwolf this season) and Newsday critic Linda Winer. Last year's Wasserstein Prize went to another Chicago-based playwright, Laura Jacqmin.

Wegrzyn, a Chicago Dramatists resident playwright and co-founder of Theatre Seven of Chicago, says the prize came at a good time. "I was canned from my dayjob this summer, and I was banking on the Temp Agency to find me work soon," she told me in an email this afternoon. "Now I'm buying time to write. I'm going to pay my rent and the bills. But I also want to go on a shopping spree through the Sky Mall catalogue so we'll see." Hickorydickory will also get a reading at New York's Second Stage as part of the prize. We profiled Wegrzyn in August 2007.