NEW HAVEN, Conn., May 30, 2025 – Playwright Ariel Stess will receive one of the world’s most prestigious playwriting awards, the Yale Drama Series Prize, for her play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. Stess’s play was selected by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-winning playwright who has been on the Yale faculty since 2021, in his first year judging the competition. Jacobs-Jenkins recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Purpose and was also named one of TIME’s Top 100 Influential People.
On October 30, 2025, Stess will be honored at Yale Schwarzman Center with a staged reading of KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA and the conferral of the $10,000 David Charles Horn Prize. Long Wharf Theatre will be a partner in this celebratory event for a second consecutive year. The highly anticipated play will be published by Yale University Press, which collaborates with the David Charles Horn Foundation and Yale Schwarzman Center to administer the prize and bring each year’s winning play to print.
KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is an occasionally off-kilter and deeply honest play about isolation, resilience, and the healing power of community. The play intertwines the lives of four women from different generations and social strata in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kara wakes up to find her husband and children missing. Twenty-year-old Emma runs away with a married man. Barbara’s ex-lover breaks into her home in the middle of the night. And the pipes in Miranda’s house burst. Through a tapestry of internal monologues and scenes, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA follows the journey of four women whose major life crises collide on Christmas Eve, leading them to accidentally help each other find a way out.
Stess commented, "Thank you to the David Charles Horn Foundation, Yale Schwarzman Center, and Yale University Press. And thank you to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a playwright-hero whose work is hugely important to me, for the incredible honor of recognizing my play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. Winning the Yale Drama Series Prize is a thunderbolt of affirmation. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA is a play about women who are isolated in their own shame. What they discover is that they need each other to get themselves out of this shame and isolation. At a time when we are hearing messages of polarization so loudly and so often, my hope is that this play reminds us we have much more in common with one another than we may realize. And in the end, no matter how many differences we have, we need each other to survive and thrive."
Jacobs-Jenkins commented, "While a lot of the submissions I read worked very hard to knock a reader over the head with ‘formal inventiveness,’ Stess’s work stood out for the line-by-line sparkle and polish of its composition and the playwright’s cool confidence in the power of well-crafted language alone to transport an audience to and through the vast inner wilds of character. Sustained direct address is no small feat—but the weave of Stess’s storytelling, almost novelistic in texture, makes it look easy. It doesn’t hurt that the tale it tells of haves and have-nots across many vectors—gender, class, age—is so compelling and tenderly told. This is dramatic portraiture of the highest order.”
Francine Horn, director of the David Charles Horn Foundation, said, “In Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s first year judging, he truly couldn’t have picked a better play as the winner of the 18th Yale Drama Series competition. This play demonstrates how storytelling can be an act of resistance, intimacy, and liberation. This is exactly the kind of bold, necessary storytelling that the David Charles Horn Foundation is proud to support!”
Rachel Fine, Yale Schwarzman Center’s executive director, stated, “Ariel's exceptional talent and visionary approach to storytelling have made an indelible impact on the theater community early in this young playwright’s career. This recognition is a well-deserved testament to her dedication and creativity. We are proud to celebrate her accomplishments and look forward to witnessing all that she will bring to the world of theater and its audiences."
Shortlisted playwrights for the 2025 Yale Drama Prize were, in alphabetical order:
- Carolina Đỗ for ÃN CHÕI eat. play. rage. (A don't fuck with the weekend shift play)
- Malena Pennycook for How Should A Conversation Be?
- Marissa Joyce Stamps for Letiche and The [Wondrous] Pursuit of Elvis
About Ariel Stess
Ariel Stess is an Obie Award-winning playwright and director originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a New Dramatists resident playwright (Class of 2028), an affiliated artist of The Playwrights’ Center, and a New Georges Affiliated Artist. Her work has been produced and/or developed at Playwrights Horizons, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Mabou Mines, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, DePaul University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and The Playwrights’ Center. She has been a resident at Yaddo Artists Colony, SPACE on Ryder Farm with Playwrights Horizons, and Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program. She was a New Georges Audrey Resident and Core Writer of the Playwrights’ Center. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb. Ariel received her BA from Bard College where she studied under JoAnne Akalaitis and Chiori Miyagawa and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College where she studied under Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney.
About Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, Pulitzer Prize winner and Tony winner. Recent theatre credits include Purpose (Pulitzer Prize; Broadway, Second Stage and Steppenwolf), Appropriate (Tony Award; Broadway, Second Stage), The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre), Girls (Yale Rep), Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), Appropriate (Obie Award; Signature Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). He currently teaches at Yale University and serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council and on the boards of Soho Rep, Park Avenue Armory, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. Honors include a USA Artists fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award.
About the David Charles Horn Foundation
The David Charles Horn Foundation, which is the sole financial supporter of the prize, was established in 2003 by Francine Horn, David Horn’s wife and partner in the international fashion publication service Here & There. In its work, the foundation seeks to honor David Horn, whose dream of having his own writing published was never realized, by offering other writers the opportunity for publication. Previous judges for the playwriting prize are Edward Albee, Sir David Hare, John Guare, Marsha Norman, Nicholas Wright, Ayad Akhtar, Paula Vogel, and a one-time panel of previous winners Neil Wechsler, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Virginia Grise, Jacqueline Goldfinger, Leah Nanako Winklerand Rachel Lynett.
About Yale Schwarzman Center
Based in New Haven, Connecticut, and located in the historic heart of the Yale University campus, Yale Schwarzman Center is a commons for university life where art, culinary, and wellness experiences converge to build bridges, nurture creativity, and foster kinship and belonging. Positioned at the crux of social cohesion, creativity and self-expression, the Center includes several flexible spaces in which members of the Yale and New Haven communities engage through free, public programming that ranges from the intimate to the grand. The Center’s iconic building— constructed in 1901, rebirthed in 2022 following a renovation by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and recognized for excellence by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art—has recently been the site for world premieres and commissions by Nathalie Joachim, Bryce Dessner, and Ash Fure, to name a few. The Center’s impact extends well beyond its walls through programming and programmatic partnerships within its home city and across the country.