Bruce Mason award

Press, 13 November 1985, Page 22

Bruce Mason award

Stephanie Johnson, aged 24, has won the 1985 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award worth ?2000. Ms Johnson, who has been based in Auckland but is temporarily resident in Australia, intends to write a play about epidemics and people’s reactions to them. She said it was inspired by the current paranoia surrounding the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the Plague, in London, in the seventeenth century.

The Bruce Mason Playwriting Award is to assist a playwright of promise to write or complete a work for the theatre. It is funded by Independent Newspapers Limited and administered by Playmarket, the New Zealand play-

wrights agency and script assessment service.

Stephanie Johnson has written plays and short stories and worked as an actor. Her first two one-act plays, “Gifts from Father” and “Cut-Out,” were produced at the Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch in August, 1980. Her second full-length play, “Takers” was produced at Auckland’s Little Maidment Theatre, in September, 1983, by the then artistic director of the Maidment, Ron Rodgers.

Ms Johnson wrote “Accidental Phantasies,” a play which explores the mind that creates pornography and the effects of pornography. It premiered at Wellington’s Depot Theatre in July. Another play, “Dancing Out of Time,” a play for

disabled teen-agers, is to be produced by Auckland’s Working Title Theatre.

Ms Johnson said she went to Australia because she had never been out of New Zealand and wanted a change of scene. At present she is one of the many unemployed New Zealanders in Sydney and said her experience there, since July, had led to work on a play about New Zealanders in Sydney. The Playmarket director, Miss Nonnita Rees, said there were 21 entrants for the 1985 Bruce Mason Award, a 50 per cent increase in entries on last year. Previous recipients were Fiona Farrell Poole, of Palmerston North, and Simon O’Connor, of Featherston.