Talene Monahon is the 2026 winner of the Horton Foote Prize for Meet the Cartozians, the Off-Broadway play that was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama this year.
The $50,000 prize was presented on the evening of Monday, October 19, at a private club on the Upper East Side. David Cromer, the Tony Award-winning director who staged the play, made the presentation, which also included a limited-edition print of Keith Carter’s well-known photograph of Horton Foote.
Second Stage Theater put the play forward. Directed by Cromer, with Andrea Martin and Will Brill in the company, it opened Off-Broadway with Second Stage in November 2025 and has since added the Outer Critics Circle Award for best new Off-Broadway play, a Drama Desk nomination and a place among this year’s Pulitzer finalists.
The play runs on two timelines. In the 1920s, an Armenian American man battles for legal recognition; a hundred years on, a new generation is fluent in pop culture’s hunger for fame and influence. Between them, it asks who is allowed to belong, and what belonging costs.
The judges’ chair, Celia Keenan-Bolger, who is also the prize’s honorary chair, said the field had been unusually strong and the decision still clear: “Talene’s play was a unanimous favorite with the judges. Its ambition and execution are exemplary.” Fellow judge Lizzie Stern called it “acutely sharp, sweeping and inquisitive.”
Keenan-Bolger and Stern sat on the panel with Ian Belknap, artistic director of New York Stage and Film; the Obie-winning director Taylor Reynolds; and the Tony-nominated lighting and set designer Jiyoun Chang.
The evening’s second award, the Horton Foote Prize Gratitude Gift, went to Waterwell. The $10,000 gift goes each year to a theater nonprofit chosen by the honorary chair, and Keenan-Bolger, who received the 2025 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her advocacy through the arts, chose the Obie-winning company. Founder Arian Moayed and artistic director Lee Sunday Evans accepted it. Moayed started Waterwell in 2002 with director Tom Ridgely, and the company makes theater, film and digital work around civic questions.
Prize founder and board chair Mari Marchbanks and executive director Valerie Brea Ross also spoke.
Set up in 2010 in memory of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, the prize recognizes an original American play, either newly produced or headed for its premiere, from nominations made by theaters across the country. Monahon joins a list of winners that runs from Lynn Nottage (Ruined) and Will Eno (Middletown) through Jordan Harrison (Marjorie Prime) and Lauren Yee (Cambodian Rock Band) to Jocelyn Bioh (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding). It is funded by the Greg and Mari Marchbanks Family Foundation of Austin, Texas.
A Brooklyn-based playwright and performer, Monahon has further productions of Meet the Cartozians to come at the Huntington and Berkeley Rep, and a new play, Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret, premiering at Classic Stage Company in May 2027. Her earlier plays include The Good John Proctor, Jane Anger and the docu-theater piece How to Load a Musket.
For more about the prize, visit the Horton Foote Prize website.
