Ulster American wins Edinburgh theatre prize

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND • Ulster American, a satirical dark comedy about a female playwright from Northern Ireland, a British director and a self-important American actor — both male — working on a play about a violent Protestant loyalist, is the winner of the 2018 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh award. The award was presented Friday morning in a ceremony here in the Scottish capital by Tambor.

The play, by David Ireland, is one of several at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe that ponder how men are reacting to a world in which women are increasingly empowered. In Ireland’s play, which has won some rave reviews, arguments about gender and identity politics reach a fever pitch and a violent conclusion.

The Best of Edinburgh award, presented annually since 2004, awards one production from the Fringe (there are almost 1,000 theatre productions this summer) with either a fully produced run in New York, for smaller, independent shows, or, in the case of larger shows created by professional companies, like Ulster American, a $25,000 cash prize to help facilitate a New York transfer. Ulster, a production of the Traverse Theater, will aim for New York in early 2019.

The award is one of several prizes presented annually at the Fringe. The Scotsman newspaper has announced a number of Fringe First awards, coveted honours for new writing at the festival — several of which have gone to productions at the Traverse, Edinburgh’s year-round theatre dedicated to new writing and always an important stop on the Fringe circuit.

The award-winning Traverse productions include Class, a thought-provoking and twisty story about a parent-teacher conference gone off the rails; “Underground Railroad Game,” an inventive American production about race, created and performed by Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard; and What Girls Are Made Of, a rock ‘n’ roll memoir of sorts written and performed by Cora Bissett (with a killer background band whose members also play the roles of multiple characters in her life). Bissett, better known here as a director (Roadkill) and actor, was, at 17, on her way to becoming a rock star (it didn’t work out).

Also among the Fringe First honorees are My Left/ Right Foot, an outrageously irreverent National Theater of Scotland musical comedy about a drama society attempting to be inclusive by staging a play based on the film My Left Foot, and Angry Alan, by Penelope Skinner (The Village Bike), about a man being drawn into the growing men’s rights movement.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which runs alongside the Edinburgh International Festival, includes more than 3,500 productions in theatre, music, comedy, dance, cabaret and other types of performance.