Adam NZ Play Award
Playmarket has named two winners of the Adam NZ Play Award for 2024 – Dan Bain for The Odyssey and Sam Brooks for This Is My Story of Us.
The award recognises and celebrates the best in unproduced writing for the theatre.
Playmarket Tumuaki Murray Lynch announced the joint winners at Circa Theatre on Saturday.
Bain’s play The Odyssey is a new take on Homer’s original epic poem. Repositioned as a comedy scramble style show for “three high-skill, high-charisma performers”, Bain asserts that you shouldn’t need a classics degree to make sense of what’s going on.
One judge described the play as “a gift to the audience’’ and “utterly delightful’’, another called it a “goddamn raucous camped up retelling’’ which leaps off the page.
Bain has been a theatre director, playwright, improvisor, street performer, actor, motivational speaker and comedian since 2001.
In This Is My Story of Us, playwright Brooks charts the love story between Kane and Hero from first date to the end of the relationship and after. In his play, what appears to be a relationship shrouded in secrecy opens out to a profound exploration of grief and a questioning of morality.
Inventive in its use of structure and underpinned by “beautiful, tender prose’’, one judge remarked that the story “hurt my heart. It sucked me in and spat me out. I was left needing to sit with my thoughts and feelings for some time”.
Brooks, an award-winning, prolific playwright and journalist, won the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award in 2016.
Other awards:
■ Runner-Up and Best Play by a Woman Playwright: Cassandra Tse for Before We Slip Beneath the Sea.
■ Best Play by a Māori Playwright:
Tawhi Thomas for Matenui.
■ Best Play by a Pasifika Playwright:
Teherenui Koteka for Kaveinga
■ Dean Parker Award and McNaughton South Island Play Award:
■ Other Finalists: