‘Love Sick’ wins 2018 Will Glickman Award
“Love Sick,” written by Ofra Daniel, is the 2018 winner of the Will Glickman Award honoring the best new play to premiere in the Bay Area in 2017. Administered by Theatre Bay Area, which announced the recipient Wednesday, Jan. 24, the prize comes with a $4,000 purse and will be officially presented at Theatre Bay Area’s Annual Conference scheduled for April 30 at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.
Daniel adapted the show from the sacred Hebrew text “The Song of Songs,” which doesn’t have a full story line, per se, but which chronicles with sensual poetry a woman’s longing for love. Produced by Jewish Circle Theatre in association with John Gertz Productions, the show ran Jan. 12-Feb. 12, 2017, at Berkeley’s Osher Studio, and at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts from Feb. 23 to March 19, 2017, prominently featuring a small orchestra of world musicians.
“This is very, very moving. I’m honored. Most of the time, you do this work, and you go home,” Daniel said over the phone, laughing. “It’s a big deal for me, an immigrant, from a different place, different life circumstances, to be acknowledged.” (Daniel is originally from Tel Aviv.)
Producer John Gertz said the show had a workshop production for invited audiences in New York right before Thanksgiving last year, with the hopes of shopping it to New York producers or artistic directors of regional theaters. By phone, he called receiving the Glickman a “game changer” in that effort.
“The show is kind of an exercise in putting mediums together,” Daniel said. “I’ve noticed that many people would go to see a rock concert, but they wouldn’t necessarily go to see theater.”
“Love Sick,” she adds, is in part the result of “thinking about a way to bridge those two.”
Presented every year since 1984, the Glickman Award is named after playwright Will Glickman (1910-83). The winner was selected by Bay Area theater critics Lily Janiak (San Francisco Chronicle), Karen D’Souza (San Jose Mercury News), Jean Schiffman (San Francisco Examiner) and Sam Hurwitt (Bay Area News Group and Marin Independent Journal).