“Liberation” by Bess Wohl was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
“Bowl EP” by Nazareth Hassan and “Meet the Cartesians” by Talene Monahon were selected as finalists.
Vinson Cunningham, a former theater critic for the New Yorker, was chosen as a finalist for Criticism.
(To understand the Pulitzer in context of other theater awards, check out my New York Theater Awards Calendar and Guide 2026)
From my review of “Liberation” on Broadway:
Playwright Bess Wohl wants us to know about the time before she was born when “women’s lib” was neither pejorative nor ironic. In “Liberation,” her warm, funny play opening tonight on Broadway about a group of feminists meeting weekly in 1970, she looks back without polemics, without parody; just with lots of questions. The real-life gathering that inspired the consciousness-raising group in the play was led by her mother.
“My devoted, dutiful mom who sewed the costumes for every school play and cooked every family dinner and did all the dishes and took me to every piano lesson and sat through it even though I was definitely not a musician, she was actually… a radical?”
“A striking blend of comedy and sincerity that explores the legacy of the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the 1970s, using the story of the playwright’s mother to demonstrate how the movement grew out of conversation, and that anyone experiencing the play has joined the discussion.“
Finalist: Bowl EP, by Nazareth Hassan
From Pulitzer: “A play focused on two skateboarders, aspiring hip-hop artists who begin to compose an album, with downtime fueling their creative process and nascent romance.”
Finalist: Meet the Cartozians, by Talene Monahon
From Pulitzer: “A drama that uses the historical lens of the Armenian American experience to illustrate the enduring hypocrisies of our country’s racialized system of immigration.”
The five-member jury;
Helen Shaw(Chair)
Theatre Critic, Brooklyn, N.Y. (currently chief theater critic at the New York Times)
Quiara Alegría Hudes*
Playwright and Author, New York City
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins*
Playwright and Professor in the Practice of Theater and Performance Studies, Yale University
Charles McNulty
Theatre Critic, Los Angeles Times
Harvey Young
Dean, College of Fine Arts; Interim Vice President for the Arts; Professor of English, Theatre Arts, American Studies and African American & Black Diaspora Studies, Boston University
*Past Pulitzer Prize winner
