Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Alumna receives playwriting award
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Tracy Bee, a 1997 USI graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and sociology, is a recipient of the Indiana Theatre Association’s new Frank and Katrina Basile Emerging Indiana Playwright Award. Bee received the award, which includes a $500 prize, at the Indiana Theatre Works Conference in Indianapolis in September. She won the Basile Award for her one-act play “Failure,” in which “a man faces his fears with the help of a lonely nurse in a nondescript medical office located in an out-of-the-way strip mall.” The one-act received a reading during the festival, and the Bloomington Playwrights Project (BPP), of which Bee is a member, won a $250 grant to support the development of the script. Bee also is a member of the BPP Writers Group. Her one-act “Time and Place for Everything in Bloomington, Indiana” was performed for the B’Town Plays series during Bloomington's ArtsWeek 2006, and the 10-minute play “For the Love of a Couch,” “a comedic rumination on furniture,” was part of the first annual BloomingPlays Festival. “Going to theatre is one of my favorite things to do and has been since high school,” she said. “I enjoy the intimacy and the immediacy of it. When I see a badly done play I have a visceral reaction, like I’ve witnessed some kind of crime. I don’t ever feel that way about other art forms - novels or short stories or films.” She first became interested in the genre when she took a playwriting class from Elliot Wasserman, director of USI Theatre. She was USI’s first student recipient of a Fulbright grant. She received an English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) and spent a year in South Korea. Bee is employed as an academic advisor in the International Studies program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Wendy Knipe Bredhold News and Information Services wkbredhold@usi.edu 812/461-5259 |
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