Minneapolis native Ike Holter has won the highest monetary award for an English-language playwright. Yale University announced this week that he is one of two dramatists who will be honored in September with the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize, which comes with a $165,000 no-strings-attached grant.
Holter, 31, grew up in the Seward neighborhood, graduated from South High and went on to the prestigious Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago.
Unfortunately for the Twin Cities, he has never returned as a full-time theatermaker, although he has workshopped scripts at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Instead, he quickly rose through the ranks of Windy City playwrights. The Chicago Tribune named him "Chicagoan of the Year" for theater in 2014.
Many of Holter's plays are set in the same fictional Chicago neighborhood.
"Holter has plenty of say about the long legacy of racism and unequal resources in the way we educate our children in big American cities," Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote in praising "Exit Strategy," a 2014 play about a failing urban school. "But this never feels like one of those arty plays, common today, that fuse shocking theme (race, sex, history, whatever) with the new-fangled dramaturgy they like to teach in posh graduate schools."
Both "Exit Strategy" and "Hit the Wall," Holter's drama about the Stonewall gay-rights riot, have enjoyed successful off-Broadway runs. He has a show opening this month at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater, and is at work on commissions from the Goodman Theatre and Writers Theatre in Chicago. But critical and popular success for a playwright — especially for one who's not writing for cable TV on the side — rarely translates into financial security.
"I'm not going on a fashion spree or anything," Holter said while on a rehearsal break Tuesday. "I'm one of many millions of other Americans who are in debt. I'm still wrapping my head around this."
The Windham-Campbell Prizes were established in 2011 at the request of Tennessee Williams' collaborator and confidante Donald Windham, a novelist who died in 2010. A Yale library administers the awards, which are somewhat mysteriously determined by global nominators, juries and selection committees. This year, two awards each went to practitioners of poetry, fiction, prose and playwriting.
