Core Alumna Jamie Pachino wins $10,000 Francesca Primus Prize

The prize honors outstanding contributions to the American theater by an emerging female theater artist; Pachino is the fourth Playwrights' Center artist to receive the award in five years.

Los Angeles-based playwright Jamie Pachino has been awarded the 2009 Francesca Primus Prize for her play Splitting Infinity. The prize, awarded by the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA), honors an emerging woman theater artist with $10,000, plus a trip to accept the prize at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, CT.

A former Playwrights' Center Core Writer, Pachino's play Some of the People, All of the Time was presented in the Center's first Ruth Easton New Play Series in 2008.

She is the fourth Playwrights' Center artist to receive the award in five years. Previous honorees include former McKnight Theater Artist Michelle Hensley (2005), Core Writer Karen Zacarías (2006), and Core Writer Victoria Stewart (2007).

Pachino's winning play, Splitting Infinity, focuses on Leigh, a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist, who pursues evidence of God through physics. The polarity between faith and science finds dramatic expression in two relationships, the first with a handsome rabbi, Saul, and the other with Robbie, a young graduate student who idolizes her.

Splitting Infinity was commissioned by the Steppenwolf Theatre and premiered at the Geva Theatre, directed by Mark Cuddy and starring Elizabeth Hess and Michael Rupert. It has had subsequent productions at San Jose Rep, Florida Stage and elsewhere. It has already received such recognition as the Laurie Foundation Theatre Visionary Award and the STAGE International Script Competition (Professional Artists Lab/California NanoSystems Institute), plus awards from the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition, the Ashland New Plays Festival, and the Becket Arts Festival.

Kirsten Brandt, who directed the production at San Jose Rep, acclaims Pachino’s “lyric style” and says the theater chose the play because of its “inherent theatricality,” complex main characters that provide great roles and “ability to make an audience think.” The San Jose Mercury News named it one of the top 10 productions of 2008.

Pachino has been writing plays for more than a decade, and her work includes Waving Goodbye, The Return to Morality, Aurora’s Motive and Race. Her plays have been produced and developed at theaters ranging from Steppenwolf to the American Conservatory Theatre, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse and Northlight Theatre. She also has extensive writing credits for both film and television, and she is an actress and choreographer.

For more information about Jamie Pachino, please visit www.jamiepachino.com.

For more information about ACTA, please visit www.americantheatrecritics.org.