M-W graduate is an 'Obie' and Actors' Equity Foundation award winner

NEW YORK — Monroe native Susan Pourfar, a graduate of Monroe-Woodbury High School, recently won a prestigious “Obie” award for her performance in the off-Broadway play, “Tribes.”

The Off-Broadway Theater Awards, or Obie Awards, are annual awards presented by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups in New York.

Pourfar was also recently named the winner of the Actors’ Equity Foundation’s Clarence Derwent Award for most promising female performers “on the New York metropolitan scene.”

“It’s a light (the award) that shines on the highway but the highway is the thing that you have to drive on,” said Pourfar. “It’s a nice thing, but it’s not ‘the be all and end all.’ That (the award) comes and goes. I just want to keep working and keep working higher and higher and with more challenges.”

The character In Nina Raine’s “Tribes,” directed by David Cromer at the Barrow Street Theatre, the lives of an eccentric family have crashed in on one another during a concurrent exploration of language and disability.

All three adult children live at home. The third, Billy (Russell Harvard), is deaf and has been mainstreamed by his hardheaded parents—who haven’t mainstreamed him enough to leave the nest.

His crotchety retired professor father, Christopher (Jeff Perry), has kept him from learning sign language. Instead, Billy proficiently reads lips to keep up with his family.

Billy strikes up a romance with Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), a hearing girl who is going deaf because of a hereditary disease. She was raised by deaf parents, teaches him to sign and connects him with the deaf community, which alienates Billy from his family.

Billy has never heard, but his brother Daniel (Will Brill) starts to hear voices in his head (especially Christopher’s), which probably indicate the onset of schizophrenia. As Sylvia and Billy become more intimate, she rejects deaf society and bewails her hearing loss.

In the tense climax, Billy rejects both speech and his parents as Sylvia translates his sign language. By the end of the play, the many ways in which humans are deaf ­— whether or not they can hear — are shown.

The award The Obies cover off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions while the Tony Awards cover Broadway productions. They were first awarded in 1956 and in 1964, off-off Broadway productions were made eligible.

With the exception of the Lifetime Achievement and Best New American Play awards, there are no fixed categories and the winning actors and actresses are in a single category titled “performance.” There are no announced nominations. Awards in the past have included performance, direction, best production, design, special citations and sustained achievement and not every category is awarded every year.

The Derwent award is Broadway’s oldest award, established in 1945 by Clarence Derwent, actor and president (1946-1952) of Actors’ Equity.

“Even if I never get another award, I hope I get other opportunities to work with top-notch people who are at the top of their craft,” added Pourfar. “People who make you a better player because they are so good.”

In addition to Tribes, Pourfar also recently appeared at The Public Theater in Lisa Kron’s “In the Wake.” Other New York credits include “When the Rain Stops Falling” at the Lincoln Center Theater, “The Singing Forest,” “The Poor Itch” (public theater) and multiple productions with the Atlantic Theatre Company.

- Nancy Kriz