Christopher Durang To Receive Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award

Playwright Christopher Durang has been named the recipient of The Dramatists Guild of America’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award, joining a prestigious roster of such past awardees as John Guare, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Miller.

The Guild’s annual awards ceremony is scheduled for Monday, May 6, at New York City’s Sony Hall. No word yet on whether the celebrated Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike playwright, who has been out of the public eye since a diagnosis of progressive aphasia was disclosed two years ago, will attend.

“It’s a privilege to celebrate Christopher Durang with the Dramatists Guild’s highest honor, in recognition of his singular voice and his enduring impact on generations of other writers,” said Lloyd Suh, chair of the Dramatists Guild’s Awards Committee, in a statement. “His grace, wit, charm, and generosity are an example to all of us in the community of American dramatists.”

Durang’s plays include Turning Off the Morning News; Why Torture Is Wrong And The People Who Love Them, Tony-winner Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike; A History of the American Film; Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You; Baby with the Bathwater; Laughing Wild; Miss Witherspoon; The Marriage of Bette and Boo; Sex and Longing; and others.

Durang has been a Dramatists Guild member since 1978 and a member of the Dramatists Guild Council since 1981.He taught at Yale and Princeton, and along with Marsha Norman directed the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School from 1984 to 2016.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award is co-presented by sponsor Final Draft, the screenwriting software company.

Durang first began experiencing symptoms of what would later be diagnosed as logopenic primary progressive aphasia in 2012. Former talk show host Wendy Williams and actor Bruce Willis have gone public with their similar diagnoses.