2019 Henry Hewes Design Awards:

The 2019 Henry Hewes Design Awards have been given to

Scenic designer Charlie Corcoran for The O’Casey Trilogy, at the Irish Repertory Theatre

James Russell and Michael Mellamphy in The Shadow of a Gunman

Charlie Corcoran

Costume designer Montana Levi Blanco for Ain’t No Mo’ at the Public Theater

In “Ain’t No Mo’,” the play by Jordan E. Cooper, making his Off-Broadway debut as both a playwright and an actor, African-American are leaving the United States en masse on flights to Africa. In the final scene, Cooper as pink-garbed stewardess Peaches is left behind. The final stream-of-consciousness monologue, accompanied by the voices of famous black Americans –Bessie and Billie, James Brown, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X — is a metaphor for the black experience in America, as Peaches can’t uproot the bag of black history, and is left defeated, stripped down to a bare black man, shouting “Give it back, give it back.”