ROBERT SCHENKKAN

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING PLAYWRIGHT & SCREENWRITER

News

Oscar Winners ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’ ‘Manchester’ Soar to Top of Disc Charts

March 4, 2017

Two Academy Award winners – and Best Picture nominees – were released on disc by Lionsgate just before the Oscars and promptly vaulted to the top of the national home video sales charts the week ended Feb. 26. “Hacksaw Ridge,” the Mel Gibson-directed biopic of a pacifist war medic that won Oscars for Best Achievement in Film Editing and Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, debuted at No. 1 on both the NPD VideoScan overall disc sales chart, which tracks combined DVD and Blu-ray Disc sales, and NPD’s dedicated Blu-ray Disc Sales chart. To read more, click here.

"Hacksaw Ridge" wins Oscar for sound mixing!

February 28, 2017

Kevin O’Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie and Peter Grace win for "Hacksaw Ridge.”

Other nominees include:

Bernard Gariépy Strobl and Claude La Haye, “Arrival” w

Andy Nelson, Ai-Ling Lee and Steve A. Morrow, “La La Land”

David Parker, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”

Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Mac Ruth, “13 Hours"

'Hacksaw Ridge' wins film editing Oscar!

February 28, 2017

"Hacksaw Ridge" won the Oscar for film editing.

Other nominees include:

Joe Walker, “Arrival”

Jake Roberts, "Hell or High Water"

Tom Cross, “La La Land”

Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon, “Moonlight”

‘Hidden Figures’, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ & ’13th’ Among Humanitas Prize Winners

February 23, 2017

It was a double double win at the Humanitas Prize ceremony today, with Hidden Figures and Hacksaw Ridge taking the top feature film award and Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Jim: The James Foley Story sharing top documentary honors. To read more, click here.

Robert Schenkkan's BUILDING THE WALL Will Premiere at Fountain Theatre, Roll Across U.S.

February 18, 2017

A new play by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle, All the Way, Hacksaw Ridge), written in direct response to the immigration policies of the Trump administration, reveals how those policies might lead to a terrifying, seemingly inconceivable, yet inevitable conclusion. Building the Wall opens at the Fountain Theatre on March 18, the first in a series of productions set to take place at theaters across the U.S. as part of a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. To read more, click here.

Denver’s Curious Theatre to produce playwright’s rapid response to the Trump era

February 12, 2017

Denver’s Curious Theatre will be among the first sites in the country to present Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s new play, a political protest piece.

“Building the Wall,” a work of “speculative fiction,” opens April 4 at Curious, in what will be only the show’s second production after Los Angeles.

Schenkkan’s previous works, “All the Way” (Tony Award 2014) and “The Kentucky Cycle” (Pulitzer Prize 1992), took years to complete. But anger is a good accelerator: The new play was written “in a white-hot fury” in the two weeks prior to the Inauguration. To read more, click here.

“The Great Society” speaks powerfully to today through the politics of yesterday

February 7, 2017

The current political climate in the United States is tense, perhaps the worst it’s been in recent memory, but Robert Schenkkan’s “The Great Society,” playing through March 5 at Zach Theatre, reminds us that our country’s political history has seen many periods of great regression.To read more, click here. 

Onstage, Rapidly Reacting to the Dawn of the Trump Era

February 6, 2017

The playwright Robert Schenkkan spent three years writing “The Kentucky Cycle,” the series of nine one-acts that won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992. He spent 21 months on a first draft of “All the Way,” which won him the Tony Award for best new play in 2014.

“Building the Wall,” a disquieting response to the dawn of the Trump era, took him just one week to complete. He wrote it, he said, in a “white-hot fury.” To read more, click here.

What do we do in the time of Trump? The theater community is trying to figure out the answer.

February 6, 2017

For Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Washington’s Theater J, it was a no-brainer. As an offering in the company’s upcoming season, he’d been mulling “Sotto Voce,” a play by the Pulitzer-winning Nilo Cruz concerning the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner filled with hundreds of Jewish refugees, that at the start of World War II was turned away by the United States and other nations. As a result, many of its passengers wound up back in Europe, and ultimately in concentration camps. Then the Trump administration announced its plan for a temporary ban on refugees and on people from seven majority-Muslim countries. And staging the play went in Immerwahr’s mind from intriguing to imperative. To read more, click here.

Four Theatres Sign on for Trump Play by Pulitzer Prize Winner

February 6, 2017

Building the Wall, a new play assembled by Tony and Pulitzer winner Robert Schenkkan in answer to the presidential campaign of President Donald J. Trump, has quickly been added to the coming season at four regional theatres around the U.S., with more likely to come. As previously reported by Playbill.com, the play will get its world premiere production March 18–21 at The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, which described the play thus: “It’s the very near future, and the Trump administration has carried out his campaign promise to round up and detain millions of immigrants. Now, a writer interviews the supervisor of a private prison as he awaits sentencing for carrying out the federal policy that has escalated into the unimaginable. This riveting, harrowing and illuminating drama delivers a powerful warning and puts a human face on the inhuman, revealing how when personal accountability is denied, what seems inconceivable becomes inevitable.” To read more, click here.

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