Glickman Award: Jonathan Spector’s ‘This Much I Know’ named Bay Area’s best new play
“This Much I Know,” Jonathan Spector’s time-tripping, head-tripping play in which a man’s search for answers about his absent wife unspools an epic metaphysical journey that weaves in Stalin’s wife, a white supremacist and an accidental killer, has won the Glickman Award as the best new stage show to debut in the Bay Area in 2022.
The play was staged by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company in September and early October, directed by company artistic director Josh Costello. The play garnered strong reviews for its evocative exploration of a multitude of ideas and themes, stunning performances by a three-person cast and its wildly creative staging.
Theater critic Sam Hurwitt described it in a Bay Area News Group account as a “delightfully brain-tickling examination of the nature of truth and perception.”
The award marks the second Glickman prize won by Spector. He won in 2019 for “Eureka Day,” a satire focusing on directors at a Berkeley day school debating mandatory vaccinations. That play also debuted at Aurora Theatre before moving to a well-received Off-Broadway run. A production of the play opened last year in London’s West End starring Helen Hunt and Mark McKinney, a member of the Kids in the Hall comedy/improv troupe. That production opened at around the same time as “This Much I Know” was opening at Aurora.
The award, now entering its 40th year, has been administered since 2004 by Theatre Bay Area, said to be the nation’s largest regional theater service group. The prize is named for famed 20th-century playwright and screenwriter Will Glickman, whose stage credits, often in collaboration with Joseph Stein, include “Body Beautiful” and the Tony-nominated “Plain and Fancy.”
The prize is meant to encourage the development of exciting new theater in the Bay Area. The award, and its $4,000 prize, will be presented to Spector at Theatre Bay Area’s annual conference in April. The awards panel consists of Bay Area theater critics David John Chavéz, Karen D’Souza, Nicole Gluckstern, Sam Hurwitt, Lily Janiak, and Jean Schiffman.
Organizers note the Spector is only the second theater artist to win the Glickman price more than once; John Fisher, artistic director of Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, won two awards in the 1990s.
Previous Glickman Award winners include such A-List playwrights as Marcus Gardley (2015’s “The House That Will Not Stand”), Christopher Chen (2013’s “The Hundred Flowers Project”), Rajiv Joseph (2012’s “The North Pool”), Sarah Ruhl (2010’s “In the Next Room (Or the Vibrator Play)”), and Tony Kushner (1992’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches”).