David Yee, seen in an undated handout photo, joins three other playwrights who bridge divides on stage and off on the shortlist for the $75,000 Siminovitch Prize. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Simnovitch Prize, Dahlia Katz, *MANDATORY CREDIT*Dahlia Katz/The Canadian Press
Playwright David Yee has been named the winner of this year’s Siminovitch Prize for Theatre, Canada’s richest theatre award.
Yee, best known for his 2015 Governor-General’s Literary Award-winning play carried away on the crest of a wave, received the news that he had won the award and the $75,000 that goes with it during a ceremony Monday night at the Storys Building in Toronto’s entertainment district.
The playwright, who is also artistic director of the Asian-Canadian theatre company fu-GEN, is hard to pigeonhole stylistically.
His output over the past two decades has included both epic history-spanning, genre-bending plays for larger casts, such as lady in the red dress (2009), as well as intimate solo shows such acts of faith (2020), which premiered as a livestream during the pandemic and has gone on to be produced on live onstage at American theatres.
Most recently, among men, which premiered in 2022 – under the direction of Nina Lee Aquino, like so many of Yee’s plays – concerned the relationship between the Canadian postwar poets Al Purdy and Milton Acorn. Its next production will be at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg in January.
“It’s never the same twice, and yet it’s immediately recognizable: That combination of swagger and sweetness, of the very funny and the pissed off, is the distinctive voice of David Yee,” said Guillermo Verdecchia, who chaired the 2023 Siminovitch jury, sitting alongside fellow playwrights Leanna Brodie, Jessica B. Hill, Rosa Laborde and Mani Soleymanlou.
Yee has selected Julie Phan, a writer and performer who is currently artist in residence at Buddies in Bad Times and splits her time between Toronto and Montreal, to receive this year’s Siminovitch Protégé Prize, which comes with a $25,000 cash award. The two will additionally have an opportunity to collaborate at an artist residency at the Banff Centre’s Playwrights Lab in 2024.
Awarded on an annual basis, the Siminovitch Prize has gone to a director, playwright or designer on a three-year cycle since being established in 2001. It recently expanded its total cash prize amount to $130,000, but rather than increasing the winner’s take has spread that wealth around.
The three playwrights who were runners-up this year – d’bi.young anitafrika, Mishka Lavigne and Berni Stapleton – will each receive $5,000 and select emerging artists to receive an additional $5,000.