HowlRound Theatre Commons and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have named veteran DC playwright and director Psalmayene 24 as recipient of the National Playwright Residency Program Award. The award provides the Brooklyn native three years of salary and workshop funding to Mosaic Theater to support the residency.

The now DC resident and nominee for the 2020 Charles Macarthur/Helen Hayes Outstanding New Play Award for his play, “Les Deux Noirs: Notes On Notes of a Native Son,” added “I came of age, as a man and an artist, in DC. I wrote my first play in DC. I met my wife in DC. So, as my adopted hometown, I feel a strong connection to many of the theaters in the DC area, especially Mosaic.”

The scope of the residency is ambitious including the continued development of a project now in the drafting stage and will be written and performed by the author himself, entitled "Dear Mapel." The play is based on Psalmayene 24’s letters (actual and imagined) to the deceased father he hardly knew, sharing a coming-of-age story within a coming-to-terms hole in his heart.

Additional projects include a hip-hop theatrical portrait of DC's controversial "Mayor for Life," Marion Barry. Another proposed work, “Freedom Strike,” tells the story of a Black performance artist who cuts off the head of Abraham Lincoln from the Emancipation Statue, a DC statue of a freed Black man and Abraham Lincoln.

Founding Artistic Director Ari Roth surmised, “If a theater is strong, it's imbued with a soul that pulsates with character and conscience. And at the heart of that soulful theater company there exist artists of rare character and conscience who radiate that theater's light and give voice to its finest articulation. Psalmayene 24 is such an artist.”

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