Tracy Letts Wins 2008 Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County

Tracy Letts has been awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for August: Osage County. The award is made "for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life." The winning production must have opened in the United States in the calendar year 2007. The Pulitzer includes a cash prize of $10,000. To read Letts' reaction to his win, click here.

The finalists for the 2008 prize were David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Christopher Shinn's Dying City. The Pulitzer jury consisted of Peter Marks, drama critic of The Washington Post; playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the prize last year for Rabbit Hole; Jeremy McCarter, drama critic of New York magazine; Charles McNulty, drama critic of the Los Angeles Times; and Lisa Portes, head of MFA Directing and the artistic director of Chicago Playworks for Young Audiences, The Theater School, DePaul University, Chicago.

A three-act, three-hour-long drama, August: Osage County tells the story of the Westons, an extended clan that comes together at their rural Oklahoma homestead when the alcoholic patriarch disappears. Forced to confront unspoken truths and astonishing secrets, the family must also contend with matriarch Violet, a pill-popping, deeply unsettled woman at the center of the storm.

Letts, a Pulitzer finalist in 2004 for Man from Nebraska, is also the author of Bug and Killer Joe, both of which enjoyed successful commercial runs off-Broadway. His newest play, Superior Donuts, will have its world premiere at Steppenwolf in June 2008. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the 42-year-old playwright has also acted in numerous productions at Steppenwolf, including Betrayal, The Pillowman, Last of the Boys, The Pain and the Itch, The Dresser, Homebody/Kabul, The Dazzle, Glengarry Glen Ross also Dublin and Toronto, Three Days of Rain, Road to Nirvana, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and the Steppenwolf for Young Adults production of The Glass Menagerie. He appeared in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Alliance Theatre Company in a production directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member and current August cast member Amy Morton. He is the son of novelist Billie Letts and the late actor Dennis Letts, who created the role of patriarch Beverly Weston in August and died on February 22.

August: Osage County was first produced last summer at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where Letts is an artistic associate, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The play opened at Broadway's Imperial Theatre on December 4 to excellent reviews and is scheduled to move to the Music Box Theatre on April 29. The cast includes Deanna Dunagan, Amy Morton, Ian Barford, Kimberly Guerrero, Francis Guinan, Brian Kerwin, Madeleine Martin, Mariann Mayberry, Michael McGuire, Sally Murphy, Jeff Perry, Rondi Reed and Troy West.

The Broadway production of August: Osage County is produced by Jeffrey Richards, Jean Doumanian, Steve Traxler and Jerry Frankel, in association with Steppenwolf Theatre Company