The sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Prize, a big-hearted evocation of queer intimacy set in a bathhouse at the end of the world In this love letter to queer bathhouse culture, the Presenter, a Mexican-American public-speaking student, is thrust into the landscapes of queer intimacy, colonialism, and erotic community when their class presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing starts to unravel. What had been a single presentation soon becomes a chorus, joining student presenters with the ghosts of bathhouses past, present, and future, along with the cleaning staff, A Conquistador!, and officials from the Centers for Disease Control, to explore queer desire and the gleeful delights of messiness. Here in the bathhouse at the end of the world, Jesús I. Valles conjures the ever-present yearning for skin to touch skin, a place of connection that shimmers in the steam of the bathhouse and refuses to ever fully fade. Bathhouse.pptx is the sixteenth winner of the Yale Drama Series prize and first winner chosen by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris.

From material Ryan (U. of London) collected for his doctoral dissertation at Oxford and a series of articles since then, he presents a general survey for English readers that incorporates both the written and oral traditions. He strives to avoid the extremes of seeing features either as particular to one culture or universal to all, and also the trap of being too descriptive and neglecting analysis. After outlining briefly the history of Russia, he looks at such topics as popular magic, wizards and witches, predictions from dreams and the human body, materia magica, geomancy, and Byzantine and post-Byzantine astrology.

A fifteen-year-old boy decides to accompany his severely depressed high school French teacher on a road trip to the Canadian province of Quebec, where the mother tongue of Voltaire and Balzac is still spoken and cherished. Clarence Coo's mesmerizing new play is a delicious amalgam of farce and tragedy, a carnival funhouse with very dark corners. Wildly inventive and heartbreakingly sad, the strange odyssey of Jimmy and the unpredictable Mr. Green takes many surprising turns, crossing the border from reality into unreality and back again while encountering displaced characters from history, literature, and the mundane, often dangerous world. Selected by Tony Award-winning playwright John Guare ("House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, "and others) from over 1,000 submissions from 29 countries, Clarence Coo's "Beautiful Province "is the sixth winner of the DC Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize. In his foreword, Guare calls Coo's work "elusive and haunting . . . funny, desperate, insane," praising it for "its intriguing story [and] its tone, sustained to the very end." Lyrical and adventurous, "Beautiful Province "is an outstanding new theatrical work, well deserving of these accolades and more.

Fire Island's gay communities, documented in a nocturnal erotic fever-dream by Matthew Leifheit Featuring 77 color photographs, To Die Alive portrays Fire Island's world of desire and its layers of history: the Ice Palace bar's infamous underwear party; the men-only Belvedere Guesthouse; clandestine encounters in the Meat Rack; and landscapes in all seasons of the island's delicate maritime forest. The wide-ranging subjects of Matthew Leifheit's portraits reflect the intergenerational community who come to the island for refuge or employment, ranging from weekend visitors to sugar daddies to bartenders and sex workers. Tinged with sadness, the book's climax mixes feelings of pleasure with desperation and loss. As homosexuality gains mainstream acceptance, many queer Americans no longer need to go to geographic extremes like Fire Island, Provincetown, Palm Springs or Key West to express themselves. But what is the cost of assimilation? To Die Alive is both romantic and grotesque, challenging the sun-bleached history of homoerotic representation on this fragile island, which itself is under constant threat of erosion by the sea. Matthew Leifheit (born 1988) is an American photographer, magazine editor and professor born in Chicago and based in Brooklyn. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, he was formerly photo editor of Vice and is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute. Leifheit's photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is held in public collections. His photographs have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Aperture, Time and Artforum. Leifheit is editor-in-chief of Matte Magazine, a journal of emerging photography that he has edited and published since 2010.

The tenth winner of the Yale Drama Series centers on a young mother dealing with life’s many trials Marking the tenth anniversary of the Yale Drama Series for emerging playwrights, Emily Schwend’s powerful work centers on Amber, a young woman struggling to raise a family in East Texas. Amber is juggling two nearly full-time jobs and three kids. Her on-again, off-again husband Chris is eternally optimistic and charming as hell, but rarely employed. The house is falling apart and Amber has an eight-year-old’s birthday party to plan. Selected from more than 1,600 entries, Schwend’s newest play—produced by the Amoralists Theatre Company at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in 2016—vividly captures the economic hardships and relationship difficulties faced by so many Americans today. “Utility is a remarkable play: beautifully written and effortlessly powerful,” said contest judge Nicholas Wright. “At every moment the happiness of human lives is put at risk: is there any greater dramatic theme?”

Memory, history, and culture collide with the starlit rooftop dreams of a myth-inspired character as Soledad and her partner, Hailstorm, redefine family on their own terms after the death of their eldest son in Iraq. blu, steeped in poetic realism and contemporary politics, challenges us to try to imagine a time before war. Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, Virginia Grise’s play blu takes place in the present but looks back on the not too distant past through a series of prayers, rituals, and dreams. Contest judge David Hare commented, "Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you’ve read it." Noting that 2010 was a banner year for women playwrights, he added, "Women’s writing for the theatre is stronger and more eloquent than it has ever been."

An earthy, cruel, and hilarious family drama of profound and reckless love Set in a bar in the Florida Everglades, this biting, brutally funny multigenerational family drama concerns a Gulf Coast couple, their disabled young ward, two lesbian tenants, and the bonds that bind them all together. The eleventh winner of the Yale Drama Series playwriting competition, it is a powerful story born out of the playwright's own experiences with the rapidly changing social environment of rural Florida, where long-standing traditions and beliefs can collide, sometimes dangerously, with new ideas of personhood, identity, and self-realization. A rich and colorful mélange of American classes and cultures, Bottle Fly recounts a profoundly human struggle to reconcile the masks worn at home with the ones donned to go out into the world.