NEW YORK CITY/LONDON: Tonight the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize announced that the 2025 award has been given to U.S. playwright a.k. payne for their play Furlough’s Paradise. Awarded annually since 1978, the prestigious international Prize is the largest and oldest award recognizing women+ who have written works of outstanding quality for the English-speaking theatre. Selected from a cohort of eight finalists, payne has received a cash prize of $25,000 and a signed print by renowned artist Willem de Kooning, created especially for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Said payne in a statement, “I am so grateful to receive this award and join a list of some of my favorite writers whose plays have shaken how I understand the world and who have made it possible—through their words transcending space and time and/or their caring and abundant mentorship—for me to write: Katori Hall, Julia Cho, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Benedict Lombe, and Paula Vogel, to name a very select few.”
“At this moment in our history as a country, and as a Prize which honors women, trans and non-binary writers, we must acknowledge the very real threats that are being aimed at our hard-won freedoms,” said Blackburn Prize executive director Leslie Swackhamer in a statement. “We must remind ourselves of the power of our voices, and the special magic we create when we lift them at the theatre. Every voice on our stage tonight deserves to be honored, celebrated and heard.”
Furlough’s Paradise is about two cousins—one on a three-day furlough from prison, the other on a break from her tech career—who gather for the funeral of their mother and aunt, respectively. It was produced at the Alliance Theatre in 2024 and will begin performances at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse next month, in productions directed by Alliance co-artistic director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden. The play also won the 20th annual Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition, as well as the National Theatre Conference’s Stavis Playwriting Award.
In announcing the production, Geffen Playhouse artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney, who also serves as chair of playwriting at Yale School of Drama, where payne received her MFA, called Furlough’s Paradise “poetic and funny, but it’s also charting what it means to try to find a utopia in a world that has a criminal justice system that is far from perfect. Payne was one of my students, and probably one of the most powerful writers I’ve encountered in my time as a professor.”
In addition to the Blackburn Prize, two other plays received Special Commendations of $10,000 each, a rare honor given at the discretion of the judges: 49 Days by Haruna Lee (Taiwan-Japan-U.S.), submitted by Playwrights Horizons (New York City), and An Oxford Man by Else Went (U.S.), submitted by South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, Calif.). This years finalists for the Blackburn Prize, each of whom received $5,000, were Chris Bush (U.K.) for Otherland, submitted by the Almeida Theatre (London); Carys Coburn (Ireland) for BÁN, submitted by the Abbey Theatre (Dublin); Keiko Green (U.S.) for You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, submitted by the UC San Diego MFA Playwriting Program; Isobel McArthur (U.K.-Scotland) for The Fair Maid of the West, submitted by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford-Upon-Avon/London); Suzie Miller (Australia-U.K.) for Inter Alia, submitted by the National Theatre (London); Anna Ziegler (U.S.) for The Janeiad, submitted by the Alley Theatre (Houston). This year’s judges were Linda Cho (U.S.), Jennifer Ehle (U.S.), Nancy Medina (U.K.), Mark Ravenhill (U.K.), George Strus (U.S.), and Indira Varma (U.K.)
I spoke recently to a.k. about Furlough’s Paradise and their growing body of work. (To learn more about them, you might check out their previous appearances on two of our podcasts: Theatrical Mustang and Offscript.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Congratulations on the win. I just read the play; it’s heartbreaking in the best way. Can you tell me about where the play came from?
A.K. PAYNE: A lot of the play came from my experience engaging with family who’ve been in the carceral system. I was really curious about how to create a play that was trying to speak to the ways that the system doesn’t always care for those who are affected by it—those within the prison, and also family outside of the prison. The initial impulse was just trying to make those stories visible. Angela Davis has this quote that I love: Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. So I’ve been really curious about how to usher forth the cultural zeitgeist of those that the system has tried to disappear, and really trying to affirm that these people that I love are part of our community.
In addition to that, I was really curious about grief at the end of the world. I think these characters are at the end of their world in many ways, and they’re trying to figure out how to create sustainable and healthy models for grief in the midst of the sense of the end of their lineages. They don’t have anyone else to teach them the morning rituals that came before them, so they are remembering those over the course of the play.
I wondered about the setting, which is referred to as “Dayton Rd.” Is that a real place, and is it based on anywhere in the Pittsburgh area where you grew up?
It’s not a specific place in real life. But it’s generally true to Great Migration cities, spaces where Black folks went after leaving the South: Pittsburgh, parts of Ohio. I think both of these cousins are existing at the end of two different displacements, the first being, of course, the slave trade and the people being brought over from the continent, but then also being displaced from the South, fleeing very bad conditions. Those two displacements are really affecting these two cousins; they’re carrying it in their bodies through a part of the play,
There’s a lot of lovely, poetic writing in the stage directions, and I just wondered how you intend that to show up or influence what’s onstage.
It depends. Not in this particular play, but in my body of work, I’ve had some collaborators who incorporated the stage directions into performance. I think there’s a production of Furlough’s that might exist where those sequences have language; there is room for that. The play is definitely a two-hander, but there are so many other people who orbit the play’s world. So I think there’s a world where that language is heard. My hope with these dream sequences and these more surreal moments is that they enable us to see underneath the illusion of realism. My hope is that the entire world feels like it’s buzzing the whole time. We have a choreographer on board for our next production, so I’m really hoping to excavate that and bring that to the front. Even as these cousins are just trying to exist in this room together, they’re carrying within them so many histories, and the dream sequences, the night terrors, of the play are really the place where all that comes up—when you can’t avoid it anymore.
Even in the realistic parts, the play moves like a piece of music. But especially after the two cousins reference a line from Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, the dialogue gets more poetic and monologic, at least for a few scenes.
Absolutely; that’s the invitation. We had a really brilliant offer from the director in the Alliance production. When For Colored Girls is mentioned, and Sade goes into the monologue about hair-braiding, and then they are both doing monologues, almost spliced together, the director had yellow and red light that mirrored what they said earlier (“I love lady in yellow,” “I love lady in red”). It signals the world lyrically beginning to shift, and the surrealism beginning to come into the story.
Both Mina and Sade have visions of utopia. Sade dreams of a sort of independent community of like-minded folks, a place without limits, while Mina talks about a world where she could a raise child without the expectations of gender. How would you compare these two visions?
That question is not one I’ve considered, so thank you for asking. I think Mina’s vision for utopia is characterized by a kind of complete freedom, just people being able to truly exist. I don’t know if she has the language quite yet, but it’s almost like this weekend is the seed of that language for herself—for example, the moment in the play where she’s talking about her dream for having kids. It’s probably the first time that she’s ever said that to someone. The idea of freedom in terms of gender is really important to Mina, and she is imagining a world where that is expansive and people have the space to be whoever they want to be, including her cousin.
Sade’s utopia is still in formation as well. She has things that she’s working through and trying to figure out in real time with the community she is present with in prison; that’s really their labor. Her utopia is really characterized by getting her people out and being able to create sustainable systems for them to stay out and care for themselves and for each other. She frames it as a nation of formerly incarcerated Black girls. You can kind of imagine these two utopias existing together on the same planet, overlapping.
I don’t know your other plays. Where does this one sit in your body of work, in terms of both style and content?
I have a series of plays called the Black Space Plays; Amani is a part of that and there are a couple of others. A few of my plays have been finalists for the Blackburn in the last two years; this is the third play that has been a finalist. The first one was called Amani, and the second one is love i awethu further, a loose adaptation of Julius Caesar. Furlough’s is very different from my other work. I think I gave myself a challenge in writing this play, like: I’m gonna put two people in a room for three days and see what happens. A lot of my work is trying to break the borders of time and space, and thinking about how we can use the conventions in new ways beyond the unity of time, place, and action. A lot of my work is speaking to that lyrical, poetic thing you were naming before. But this one is doing a dance a little bit, between the realism and the surrealism. Amani, in a similar way, is both grounded and also thinking about flight; that one is about a father who just recently got out of prison, and is building a rocket ship to space so the world can’t contain his child.
I am writing a series that is duos of people in enclosed environments trying to grieve. I have a second play of that series, a sibling play for Furlough’s called Mouth of the Mississippi that I’m working on with National Black Theatre right now. That play is about a grandmother and grandchild grieving together. So in some ways Furlough’s is an outlier, and in other ways it’s acutely rooted in themes I’m curious about: prison and breaking free, liberation and grief and mourning.
When Amani was at National Black Theatre a few years ago, there was a lobby display that prompted folks to reflect on the question, “What is your plan for liberation?” So I’ll close by asking: What is your plan for liberation, a.k.?
I think it starts super small at first. One of my favorite quotes is by Toni Cade Bambara, who says, “Revolution begins with the self, in the self.” And Audrey Lorde, who said that self-care is an act of political warfare. She means self-care not in the sense of, you know, “Go get a massage,” but the kind of self-work that is more internal. How can one work on oneself so you can show up for your community—where you’re actively trying to work on your own life but also trying to create space for others?
To answer your question, liberation is really the steps one takes to move closer and closer to freedom. It’s the daily work of trying to imagine a different world, a different future. That’s why I’m really excited about theatre. I love theatre so much, because it is about gathering people toward a particular question. I can’t just sit in my apartment and write a play and just be in my head and have all the answers; I have to be in a room with a designer and an actor and a director. You have to all ask the questions together, and that’s such a gift. That, to me, is the active embodiment of what liberation looks, feels, and sounds like: our capacity to labor together to create it.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
