NHP alum Tammy Ryan has been named the inaugural recipient of The Boost, a new commission awarded to a woman, trans or nonbinary playwright over the age of 40, for a play to be written in conversation with Leah Ryan’s play The Wire.
Tammy is a widely produced playwright, whose previous honors include the American Theater Critics Association’s Francesca Primus Prize for Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods, and the American Alliance of Theater in Education’s Distinguished New Play Award for The Music Lesson. Ryan is an alumna of Pittsburgh Public Theater‘s Playwrights Collective and a resident playwright of New Dramatists.
She received The Boost commission for her proposed play Tutankhamun or the Last Pharaoh in Queens (working title). The play, set in New York City in 1978 and in the present, will center on the transportation of the King Tut exhibit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Grappling with themes of family, class, race and the collisions between generations, the new play will investigate questions such as: “How do we chase our dreams when the obstacles are so high that we cannot see over the walls that surround us?”
This new work is slated to have a public reading in the spring of 2025.
On receiving the commission, Ryan said, “I am honored to be the inaugural recipient of The Boost and am grateful that the Leah Ryan Fund sees value in supporting women, trans and nonbinary playwrights in mid-career. When we’ve reached an age where we have honed our voices, gained some understanding of our craft and now have the life experience to create our best work, to be ‘boosted’ up in this way can be a game changer. I hope to honor the memory of Leah Ryan with the play that I write and to help create momentum for future recipients of The Boost.”