Dear Friends,

If it were not for the chance Page 73 gave me, I’m not sure what my life would look like now.

When they called and told me that Kentucky was going to be produced, I sat and cried at the desk of my day job. I had been in New York for a decade, using money I cobbled together to self-produce my plays. I was beginning to think that that was the best I could do. Page 73 helped me realize that I was just getting started.  

I promptly took the chance that Page 73 gave me to take a bet on myself. I quit my day job to go all in on the process, I gave up my apartment, couch-surfed, and spent time out of rehearsals writing new work. The risk paid off. After my Page 73 premiere, countless doors opened. Within a year, I was able to make writing my full-time job. Now, five years later, I sit on Page 73’s Board. 

Watching as covid-19 has shattered the lives of many theater workers, I worry for the emerging playwrights like me five years ago who are waiting for their shot to carve out a fruitful career.

That’s why it’s so important now to help Page 73 in our mission to support writers who have yet to have their first professional production in New York. In our current theatrical landscape, early-career writers risk being completely left behind by theaters that will not prioritize them. I firmly believe this will hurt theater in an irrecoverable way if we lose a generation of new voices and the countless important ideas integral to our culture they will offer us.

I’m asking for your help to keep these voices loud. To help nourish them for the sake of our art form. Will you support Page 73 with a gift today?

Thank you so much!

Leah Nanako Winkler

P.S. Page 73 is returning to the stage with John J. Caswell Jr.'s Man Cave, and I hope I'll see you there -- a Page 73 premiere is always a highlight of the theater season!

Leah Nanako Winkler is an award-winning Japanese-American playwright from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington, Kentucky. Her play Kentucky premiered in 2016 in a co-production with Page 73 and Ensemble Studio Theater. Other plays include God Said This, Two Mile Hollow, Hot Asian Doctor Husband and among others. Honors include the Yale Drama Series, Mark O’Donnell Prize from The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons, the Jerome New York Fellowship, the 2019 Francesca Primus Prize, and most recently the 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award. For TV Leah has worked on Ramy where she was awarded a Peabody Award, New Amsterdam and was most recently she was a writer/producer on Hbo Max's Love Life. She is currently adapting her play Nevada Tan (an Audible Commission) into a film for Lucky Chap, adapting her play HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND into a feature for Killer Films and adapting the best-selling memoir THE WOO WOO to television for UCP/Escape Artists, as well as writing an original Catwoman story podcast for DC Comics/Spotify. She has a original half-hour comedy in development at FX. For Theater she is currently on commission from Yale Rep and WP Theater.