BU grad student honored for work as playwright

A Boston University graduate student recently won the Paul Green Playwrights Prize, awarded by the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

BU doctoral candidate of Editorial Studies Todd Hearon, of Jamaica Plain, won for his play, “Wives of the Dead,” a modern adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s play set in pre-Revolutionary America.

“I’d never entered this contest, but had just finished revisions on [Wives of the Dead] that I thought was ready for consideration,” Hearon said. “I sent it out in September and received news of the prize in February. My reaction to winning was, of course, surprise. But I also felt honored and pleased to have been associated in such a way with the North Carolina Writers’ Network.”

The contest judge and Tony and Emmy award-winner Ken Howard said of the 11 finalists chosen by preliminary judges, he found Hearon’s work to be “a superior piece of writing.” He also said because of the high quality of writing, the play is ready to go into rehearsal now, according to executive Linda Hobson of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

The Paul Green Playwrights Prize began 10 years ago and is funded by the Paul Green Foundation, which honors Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and activist, for free press and speech.

“I grew up in western North Carolina in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, so this award represented a kind of homecoming to me; a form of recognition from a place left long ago and a way to reconnect, as it were, with roots,” Hearon said. “I also felt honored to be associated with the contest’s namesake, Paul Green, an important North Carolina writer.”

Hearon, who completed his undergraduate work at Boston College, currently teaches a Shakespeare class at BU in addition to continuing his writing.

“Wives of the Dead” opened at The Bridge Theatre Company in Boston last night. Hearon is a founding member of the Company.

“I’ve just completed my first book of poems — half of which is, incidentally, dramatic monologues — and am beginning to see the glimmerings of new play, but very distant, on a horizon somewhere in May,” he said.

Hearon’s last dramatic work was a full-length monologue in verse titled, “What Ghosts There Were.” Produced last spring, the play featured a nude woman sitting in an artist’s studio. The monologue communicated the private musings of the woman as the artist silently painted her. Hearon said he thinks definitive moments in one’s life are best portrayed through the woman.

“My plays want to give memory a life — by which I mean the assertion and tenacity, the refusal to lie down and die or to be pigeon-holed to death — that seems true to my own experience of it,” he said. “… It has little to do with accuracy: I live by misconstruction of events.”