Updates

The American Playwriting Foundation (David Bar Katz, Founding Artistic Director), a program of Building for the Arts (BFA; David J. Roberts, President; Jeffrey A. Horwitz, Board Chair), today announced emerging musical theater writer and composer Jack D. Coen as winner of the $65,000 2025 Relentless Musical Award, for his inventive, existential sci-fi comedy Jo Jenkins Before the Galactic High Court of Consciousness. The Relentless Award, the largest annual cash prize in American theater, emphasizes works that are fearless in their choice of subject matter, featuring bold, relentlessly honest storytelling. 2025’s award—given in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emmy and Grammy-winning musician and Fountains of Wayne co-founder Adam Schlesinger—is the second devoted specifically to musical theater. (The musical award is presented bi-annually, alternating with the Relentless Award for plays, in honor of Hoffman.) As opportunities and resources throughout the theater world contract — particularly for the development of original musicals — the Relentless Award is committed to bringing bold new works to the attention of the mainstream. 

 

Finalists, who are awarded $2,500, include Jaime Cepero’s Francois & the Rebels; Brandy Hoang Collier (book), Clare Fuyuko Bierman (lyrics), and Erika Ji’s (music) Yoko’s Husband’s Killer’s Japanese Wife, Gloria; and Cheeyang Ng’s Legendary. The winning and finalist musicals will be honored at a star-studded ceremony/performance on October 12 at Building for the Arts’ multi-theater complex, Theatre Row (410 w. 42nd street). 

 

Coen and the three finalists were selected by a panel of esteemed artist judges with personal connections to Hoffman and Schlesinger — and whose work represents a wild range encompassing musical theater, theater, music, performance, literature, and television. They include: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator, star, and Schlesinger’s close friend and collaborator Rachel Bloom; three-time Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (The Bridges of Madison County); 13-time Emmy Award winner and Schlesinger-collaborating playwright David Javerbaum (Cry Baby); multi-platinum songwriter and producer and friend of the late Schlesinger Sam Hollander; composer/arranger, educator, and winner of the inaugural Relentless Musical Award (with collaborator Shayok Misha Chowdhury) Laura Grill Jaye; Relentless Award Founder and close friend of Schlesinger’s since they shared a freshman dorm at Williams College, David Bar Katz; two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (Ruined, Sweat); acclaimed multidisciplinary artist musician and writer Brontez Purnell (100 Boyfriends, Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse); and Obie-winning playwright Lucy Thurber (The Hill Town Plays). 

 

The Relentless Musical Award seeks unproduced full-length musical works by applicants who haven’t previously been produced on Broadway. All submissions were judged anonymously — with writer/composer names and personal information removed — first by a sub-committee of over twenty professional theater artists who narrow the field down to the eight semi-finalists, which are presented to the judges.

 

Coen’s musical follows Jo Jenkins, a marine-biologist-turned-actuary, who has finally embraced ordinary existence and accepted what she can’t control…climate change, the death of the universe, etc. But now, her boyfriend is proposing not just marriage, but children and an alien is at her door, demanding that she defend humanity to an intergalactic council. So, actually, the universal ball is squarely in her court. Jo Jenkins is a theatrically audacious genre-bending musical, with an intricately crafted, eclectic score—asking what it means to live at the end of the world. 

 

While Coen has yet to have a full production of his work, Stephen Sondheim praised his artistry as “remarkably craftsmanlike” and “skillful and graceful.” Relentless Award Artistic Director David Bar Katz commented, “By selecting Jo Jenkins Before the Galactic Court of Consciousness, our sub-committee and judges succeeded in their near-impossible task of finding a work of art that embodied both Phil’s relentless rip your heart out passion and Adam’s crystalline ironic pop sensibility. Our hope is that by winning this year’s award, Coen’s stunning climate change science fiction, character-driven allegory, will be one step closer to getting the full production it deserves.”

 

The musical synthesizes many facets of the artist’s background, passions, and concerns: his showtunes are steeped in the classical tradition that’s been the basis of his musicianship (Coen is also a working pianist and organist) and its protagonist is a former marine biologist (Coen is a botanist and scuba diver). 

 

Coen said, “I’m humbled to be honored in the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Adam Schlesinger, whose artistry radiated a sincerity and intense humanity I deeply aspire to. My love for this art form stems from its capacity to teach us about ourselves by disarming us through comedy. In that spirit, I followed what still feels like a crazy impulse to write a sci-fi allegory for living through the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises. This award encourages me to keep following those impulses—and to meet this urgent moment, as we all must, with relentlessness.”

 

About The American Playwriting Foundation 

 

The American Playwriting Foundation grants the country’s largest prize for unproduced plays, the $65,000 Relentless Award, founded in memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and now likewise honoring the legacy of Adam Schlesinger with the Relentless Musical Award for musical theater artists. Led by Artistic Director David Bar Katz and Literary Manager and Artistic Producer Anna O’Donoghue, with a team of Artistic Advisors and annual Relentless Award Selection Committees both brimming with contemporary theater visionaries, the Foundation identifies and uplifts the writers who will define theater’s next chapter. 

 

The Relentless Award began in 2015—granted in its first year to Clare Barron for Dance Nation and Sarah DeLappe for The Wolves, two plays that would go on to have significant influence on American theater; Barron and DeLappe would both become Pulitzer Prize finalists for these respective works. In ensuing years, it has continued to honor writers who would soon become household names for reimagining what’s possible on our stages, including Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Aleshea Harris—both, now, likewise Pulitzer Prize finalists. Last year’s award went to Dave Harris for MANAKIN. Lynn Nottage, who has served as a judge for multiple years, emphasized that in “a moment when the impulse of young writers is to craft plays that are small, tidy and producible, the Relentless Award celebrates writing that disrupts and up-ends our notions of what can be presented on the American stage.”