- Portland Playhouse
Nerd update! All but a few of this year’s PEN Literary Award winners were announced today, and two have ties to Portland. Rob Spillman, editor at Portland/Brooklyn-based Tin House , won the Nora Magid Award for Editing, for “including a wide range of writers, seeking new and unpublished voices, and being on the forefront of the move from print to digital.” I would like to add “publicly advocating for gender parity in publishing” to that list, because he’s done that too, with the outcome being that the breakdown of Tin House‘s bylines by gender has improved over the years.
They also publish some of the most beautiful books around, but that’s a story for EVERY another day.
Back to the PENs! Playwright Anne Washburn was also a winner. If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she wrote the absurdly titled Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, which is having its regional premiere at Portland Playhouse this week. Here’s what the PENfolk had to say about Washburn:
Whether she’s inventing an entirely new language as she had in The Internationalist, creating an imagined science fiction world through the vocabulary of mime as was witnessed in A Devil At Noon, or meditating on a post-electric world which was so hilariously and poignantly wrought in her masterful Mr. Burns, one never quite knows what to expect from her brilliant, always changing body of work.
The latter—which, yes, the Mr. Burns it refers to is THE Mr. Burns of Simpsons villainy reknown—opens today at Portland Playhouse. It’s about the Simpsons and part of it takes place OUTSIDE (not joking—the Portland Playhouse website promises that “Ponchos will be provided if needed”). If that’s not inducement enough to go see it, I don’t know what is!
You can see a full list of winners here.