David Greenspan takes the career prize and three emerging writers share the grants as the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation names the recipients of its 2026 Idea Awards for Theatre, each of them carrying $25,000.
The foundation’s Tooth of Time Distinguished Career Award goes to David Greenspan, the playwright and performer behind She Stoops to Comedy and the solo play The Argument. The prize honors writers whose work has been driven by ideas across a whole career, and Greenspan’s has rarely stayed inside one form: between 2011 and 2022 he developed and performed solo renditions of three American plays from the late 1920s, among them Eugene O’Neill’s six-hour Strange Interlude and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. His honors already include eight Obies, along with Guggenheim, Lortel and Fox fellowships.
Minna Lee receives the Ollie New Play Award, which goes to an emerging playwright for an ambitious new play. Lee, a Hmong-Vietnamese American writer and animator, is best known for My Home on the Moon, which had its world premiere at San Francisco Playhouse under Mei Ann Teo and won Best Original Script from the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. The foundation’s executive director, Kate Bussert, describes Lee’s new play, A Breath From the Garden, as one that takes the structure of a Hmong funeral and builds a comic, gothic fantasy on it.
The two Vivace Musical Theatre Awards, for new musicals with big ideas behind them, go to Francesca D’Uva and Jerome Walker. D’Uva, a comedian and composer based in Brooklyn and Savannah, Georgia, played her one-person show This Is My Favorite Song at Playwrights Horizons in the 2024–2025 season; her new work borrows the structure and tools of video games to look at self-creation, isolation and connection. Walker, a composer, pianist and educator from Washington, DC, now living in Brooklyn, is writing Something in the Water with playwright Noah T. Parnes, a musical that turns a monster myth around to examine the people who invent and retell it. His most recent independent project, the song cycle how would you have us, sets texts by Black American writers from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance.
“These plays take a community to build,” said Sheilah Rae, a board member of the foundation, “so we are also partnering with theatre companies and producers to further develop our awarded projects, and get these pieces out to audiences.” Ellen Maddow, who won the Tooth of Time Award in 2025 and sat on this year’s panel, called Greenspan “a titan of our theatre community.”
The awards will be presented at a private ceremony on Thursday, November 19 at 5 p.m. at West Bank Café, 407 W. 42nd St., where the Vivace winners are among the performers. The foundation was created under the bequest of the theatrical agent Bret Adams, whose clients included Phylicia Rashad and Kathy Bates, and his partner Dr. Paul Reisch; nominations for all three awards come only from its Board of Artistic Advisors. More information is on the foundation’s website.
