Winner of the 2012 Ruby Prize (Southern Rep’s annual new play award for a woman of color playwright), Merit is a two-act comedic drama about race, isolation, academia and sex. Set in a fictional but contemporary college town in Vermont, Merit follows Mona, a precocious and passionate fiction writer who is the only student of color (and Southerner) in her prestigious graduate program. When she befriends distinguished professor Doctor Sive—a demanding divorcee with fatigued sex appeal—the two are called to strike a balance between curiosity and propriety, power and love, desire and professionalism. Merit was developed as part of the 2010 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. Check out these photos of the staged reading at Southern Rep New Play Bacchanal HERE.

staged readings

December 3, 2012 Performance Network Theatre Fireside Festival of New Work Ann Arbor, MI

January 4-7, 2012 Southern Rep New Play Bacchanal New Orleans, LA

November 19, 2010 Voices of Revolution @ UMass featuring Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Lydia Diamond, Kirsten Greenridge & Lenelle Moise (Amherst, MA)

August 28, 2010 Tisch School, New York University (New York, NY)

May 16, 2010 Whidbey Island Center for the Arts (Langley, WA)

May 17, 2010 ACT (Seattle, WA)