Lilly Camp ('17) Wins for "Best Friend/Person/Girlfriend"
The Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts has announced the winner of the 2018 Rita and Burton Goldberg Dramatic Writing Award. This year’s honor and $7,500 cash prize goes to Lilly Camp (’17) for her play Best Friend/Person/Girlfriend.
The Goldberg Playwriting Prize was established in 1998 to honor the best play or plays written by a graduate or undergraduate student in the Department of Dramatic Writing. Lilly Camp is a Brooklyn-based queer writer originally from Los Angeles, CA. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Rochester in 2015 and an MFA from NYU Tisch in 2017. Her writing focuses on theater and television, and she also co-writes and produces a podcast, Hairy Legs Hannah’s Feminist Quarter-Hour, (Semifinalist, Austin Film Festival, 2017). She has been recognized by the Theatre Masters Festival, Fusion Film Festival, LA Indie Film Festival, and the LA Femme Film Festival. At NYU, she received the Tisch Future Screenwriters’ Fellowship and the Outstanding Work in TV and Play award upon graduation.
Best Friend/Person/Girlfriend introduces us to Elle Summers—a “walking college application” to most people, “loser” to some—who can’t wait to trade suburban Los Angeles and an abusive mother for Harvard and grown up conversations. That is, until her friend Matthew Durand asks her to be the “clean-up crew” to her soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Haley Moore and what begins as an awkward evening of crying turns into Haley and Elle spending every moment together. And maybe more? That depends on who you ask. Tackling sexuality, high school culture, and social media obsession, Best Friend/Person/Girlfriend shows us how coming of age in the Internet era hasn’t gotten any easier.
The play will have a staged reading on April 27 and 28 at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Best Friend/Person/Girlfriend was among five plays to make it to the finalist round. The others included Francisco Mendoza for Machine Learning, Tyler English-Beckwith (’18) for Mingus, Christian Mendonca (’17) for American Quality, and Jacob Marx Rice (’18) for The Tragical Historie of Maximillian Robespierre.
In addition to the prize’s founder Rita Goldberg, the selection committee was comprised of Department Chair Terry Curtis Fox, Playwriting area head Rinne Groff, faculty member Lucas Hnath, and Flea Artistic Director Niegel Smith.