Playwright Jason Wells Awarded 2010 Osborn Award

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) has announced that playwright Jason Wells is the winner of the 2010 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for emerging playwrights. ATCA will give Wells his award Saturday, March 27 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky.

The Osborn Award goes to Wells for his play, "Perfect Mendacity," which premiered in May 2009 at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida. "Perfect Mendacity" was commissioned by the Manhattan Theater Club and developed as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s fourth annual First Look workshop series.

Jason Wells is originally from St. Louis, but currently calls Chicago home. Wells is an actor and screenwriter as well as a playwright, and his first play, "Men of Tortuga" was also produced at Steppenwolf’s First Look workshop.

The Osborn Award is designed to recognize the work of an author who has not yet achieved national stature, or, to be more specific, someone has not had a significant New York production, been staged widely in regional theaters or received other major national awards.

"Perfect Mendacity" is a political thriller with a plot ripped from today's headlines. As Theatre in Chicago describes it: "When a top secret, internal memo from a scientific research facility is leaked to the media, Dr. Walter Kreutzer is forced to take a lie detector test about its origins. With his career on the line, Walter gets tangled up in investigations of bioterrorism and racially motivated killings. As suspicions escalate that Walter’s wife is involved, the play’s riveting plot twists uncover the insidious hypocrisy of government sanctioned discrimination."

For more information on the Osborn Award and ATCA, visit www.americantheatrecritics.org.