For the second time in its three-year existence, the Wasserstein Prize—named for the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein—has chosen a Chicago winner. Marisa Wegrzyn was announced this morning as the winner of the 2009 prize, established after Wasserstein’s death in 2006 and awarded each year to a female playwright “who has not yet received national attention.” The award comes with a $25,000 stipend; it’s “intended for a writer to whom $25,000 will make a substantial difference in her professional life,” according to TDF, which administered the award for the first time this year. (That’s pretty much every writer I know. But I digress.) Wegrzyn’s script Hickorydickory was chosen as the winner by a panel of Wasserstein’s friends that included Lincoln Center Theater artistic director Andre Bishop, actress Alma Cuervo, entrepreneur Yscaira Jimenez, playwright Bruce Norris (whose new play A Parallelogram premieres at Steppenwolf this season) and Newsday critic Linda Winer. Last year’s Wasserstein Prize went to another Chicago-based playwright, Laura Jacqmin.

Wegrzyn, a Chicago Dramatists resident playwright and co-founder of Theatre Seven of Chicago, says the prize came at a good time. “I was canned from my dayjob this summer, and I was banking on the Temp Agency to find me work soon,” she told me in an email this afternoon. “Now I’m buying time to write. I’m going to pay my rent and the bills. But I also want to go on a shopping spree through the Sky Mall catalogue so we’ll see.” Hickorydickory will also get a reading at New York’s Second Stage as part of the prize. We profiled Wegrzyn in August 2007.

American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli announced Tuesday night that the company is planning a months-long celebration of its 25th anniversary, commissioning short works from 34 playwrights from the Chicago area and around the country. Each playwright was asked to choose a year from the company’s lifespan, 1985 to 2010, and use that year as a springboard to address ATC’s mission question: What does it mean to be an American?

The short pieces will debut in groups of five on February 8, March 1, May 24, June 1 and June 7; the entire collection will then be reprised each evening June 16–20, during the Theatre Communications Group’s conference in Chicago. Paparelli and Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes will collaborate on a prologue piece to introduce the evening.

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Erik Kaiko, Govind Kumar, David Rhee and Joseph Anthony Foronda

Conceptually, Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway Sings the Silk Road seems like a brilliant idea. Silk Road Theatre Project, known for its mission of championing work by playwrights of Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent, takes a century’s worth of musical-theater songs set along the ancient, eponymous trade route—most penned by American or western European writers who exoticized and “otherized” Eastern lands and their people—and gives them to performers of those ethnicities, who provide context and their own identity experience. It’s an act of reclamation, of sorts. And it’s hard to disagree that, especially in the mid-20th century when musical theater was at the height of its popular culture influence, shows like The King & I, South Pacific and Flower Drum Song had a strong impact on American perceptions of “the Orient.”

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St. Paul Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic P. Papatola reports that the Twin Cities leg of Kevin Von Feldt’s planned three-city tour of A Christmas Carol has been canceled. Minneapolis’s Orpheum Theatre called it off after Von Feldt failed to make a second deposit payment. Von Feldt tells Papatola that he’s hoping to reschedule the Minneapolis week, which was scheduled to come between stops in Baltimore and Chicago’s Civic Opera House, but that without that week the tour would likely fall apart. This is the latest complication for Von Feldt, who has a history of troubled productions; keeping in character, he threatens legal action against Twin Cities programmer Broadway Across America in Papatola’s report.

In an unusual move for a very small theater company, the New Colony is transferring its current production, the new James Asmus play Calls to Blood, midway through its run. What’s more, the company’s transferring within the same building. Demand for tickets has been strong enough over the last two weeks in the Royal George’s 50-seat upstairs Gallery space that TNC is confident enough to pack up and head downstairs, into the 180-seat Cabaret space, starting Thursday 29. If the show’s as well executed as it sounds—I haven’t seen it yet, but you can read John Beer’s review—perhaps the extra seats are needed to accommodate repeat viewings; in the company’s equally unique ticketing scheme, a single ticket purchase allows for unlimited attendance. Calls to Blood runs through November 7.

The cast of The Addams Family arrived in town this week for its final weeks of rehearsals before the show begins previews November 13. (The show won’t open for the press until December 9.) There are plenty of big names (Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth) and Broadway stalwarts (Kevin Chamberlin, Carolee Carmello, Terrence Mann) in the New York-bound production, but the cast also features some young up-and-comers. I sat down yesterday with two of them: Krysta Rodriguez, who portrays the show’s 18-year-old Wednesday Addams, and Wesley Taylor, who plays Wednesday’s unnervingly “normal” boyfriend Lucas Beineke.

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As if to prove that anything can go wrong in live theater, nearly everything did at Monday night’s 41st annual Joseph Jefferson Awards ceremony. (See the full list of winners.) Starting with an over-descended curtain in the opening number by the cast of Million Dollar Quartet that briefly cut off the drummer and bass player from the rest of the band, the show was marked by a remarkable number of flubs. Most of the evening’s presenters seemed unrehearsed, leading to bungled sequencing with the PowerPoint projection of nominees’ and winners’ names and to a number of awkward moments waiting for winners who weren’t there. (I counted at least ten no-shows, about a quarter of the total, including Blackbird’s William L. Petersen, Miss Saigon’s Joseph Anthony Foronda and The History Boys‘ designer Brian Sidney Bembridge; also, not a single representative of Steppenwolf was present to accept its best production—large trophy for The Seafarer.) Hosts Elizabeth Ledo and Rob Lindley, too, seemed to be ad-libbing their shtick all evening. They’d have done well to take a cue from 50th-anniversary honorees Second City: Improv in rehearsal, then set the script.

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TimeLine’s lauded Chicago premiere of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which closed yesterday after a much-extended six-month run, took home five trophies tonight at the Joseph Jefferson awards, more than any other production. The Jeff committee threw in its lot with the Pulitzer committee by awarding four shooting stars to the Goodman’s world premiere of Ruined, including best new work for playwright Lynn Nottage; since moving to Manhattan Theatre Club (with whom the Goodman co-produced) the play has picked up a slew of awards, including the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel, Obie and the aforementioned Pulitzer Prize. Court Theatre’s Caroline, or Change also netted four richly deserved Jeffs. Seth Bockley’s Jon (new adaptation) and Josh Schmidt, Jan Tranen and Austin Pendleton’s A Minister’s Wife (musical) were the other new-work awardees. The complete list of winners is after the jump (click here for a refresher course on the nominees); find a report on the ceremony here.

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That star-studded Christmas Carol I wrote about yesterday is already looking troubled before tickets have even gone on sale. Just one day after the production was announced, the show’s reps are now saying Stockard Channing and Timothy Hutton are no longer signed on. F. Murray Abraham, James Garner, Wayne Knight and George Wendt are supposedly still on board, though it’s perhaps worth noting that Garner is announced to narrate as Charles Dickens; one of the many past complaints about producer Kevin Von Feldt is that he advertised Sir John Gielgud as Dickens in past productions without noting that Gielgud’s narration was taped (not to mention that Gielgud was still owed payment for his voiceover work). The planned production goes on sale Friday via TicketMaster.

UPDATE: Kevin Von Feldt has contacted us to say that Gielgud was paid for his work in 1994 and that he was not advertised as the narrator in the 2008 production. He also notes that, for the current production, “James Garner is live, although his recorded voice will be used for portions of the show when its not appropriate to have in a stage seated at his desk.”

Plans were announced this afternoon for a star-studded version of A Christmas Carol to play the Civic Opera House Christmas week. F. Murray Abraham, Stockard Channing, James Garner, Timothy Hutton, Wayne Knight and George Wendt are all on the bill, an impressive (if a bit bizarrely eclectic) grouping. But before the Goodman gets worried, one important detail is of note: This Carol is adapted, directed and produced by one Kevin Von Feldt.

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