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2010 TATE Awards
Published: 6/13/2010 10:15 PM
Last Modified: 6/13/2010 10:15 PM

American Theatre Company’s production of “12 Angry Men” won the top prize at the 2010 Tulsa Awards for Theatre Excellence, presented Sunday at Cascia Hall Performing Arts Center.
The awards also honored Tulsa native Mary Kay Place with its Distinguished Artist Award, for her acclaimed 30-year career in television, film and music.
This staging of Reginald Rose’s classic drama about jury deciding the fate of a young man accused of killing his father earning a $10,000 cash prize and a Lucite trophy of the TATE award logo.
In accepting the award, director Robert Walters thanked his cast and crew, saying it was a show in which “everything just fell into place.
He thanked the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which underwrites the TATE awards, adding, “we’re looking forward to doing theatre in Tulsa for another 40 years.”
This past season marked ATC’s 40th anniversary.
“Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse,” a children’s show by newcomer Playhouse Theatre, won second prize as outstanding play. It was included in this category rather than Outstanding Youth Theatre Production because its cast was not made up primarily of student-aged actors.
The company’s founders, Courtneay Sanders and Chris Crawford, accepted the award, which includes a $5,000 cash award and trophy.
“This is our first year, and we’re so thrilled to be a part of such a fantastic theater community,” Sanders said.
Crawford added that he felt “as if I was among royalty” being a part of the evening, and thanking the TATE judges for “thinking that 15 mice are worthy of a TATE award.”
Heller Theatre’s production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Rabbit Hole” earned the $2,500 third prize.
Clark Theatre’s “Annie Get Your Gun” won the $2,500 prize for Outstanding Youth Theatre Production. Its director, Erin Scarberry, also directed “Rabbit Hole.”
Place, who begins filming the fifth season of the HBO series “Big Love” in July, said she was “blown away” by the variety of theater in Tulsa.
“We didn’t have these kind of choices when I was growing up in Tulsa,” Place said.
She said her own fascination with acting began at age 7, when her parents took her to a show at the University of Tulsa, about a little girl living in a New York City hotel.
“I don’t know what brought it to my head,” Place said, “but watching that little girl made me think, ‘I want to do that.’
“Then we went back stage and I found out that it wasn’t a little girl, but a 20-year-old college coed,” she said. “But that’s when I realized what it meant to be an actor, and the transformative power of the theater.”
Place encouraged the crowd that was important about any activity in the arts was “the doing, the process, not the place. It could be here, it could be New York. What matters is that we are storytellers. And we share stories to satisfy that innate need to connect and communication with the world around us.”
Ken Busby, TATE committee member and executive director of the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, presented Place with a proclamation from Mayor Dewey Bartlett, and announced that Place had donated the funds for a new award, to be called the Tulsa Legend Award.
Teresa Miller, a member of the TATE awards committee and director of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers, and Rich Fisher, KWGS general manager and “Studio Tulsa” host, served as masters of ceremonies.
Author and comedian Barry Friedman presented the awards.
“We celebrate you, the theater people, because you don’t think about yourselves enough,” Friedman said.
He also pointed out that a number of other events — from the World Cup to the Tony Awards — were also happening on Sunday evening.
“We have the most creative and agile minds in the city here, and they can’t manage to work a calendar,” he said.
A total of 13 plays by nine non-profit theater companies were nominated for the TATE awards.


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James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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