Iowa alumnus nominated for Tony Award

University of Iowa alumnus Samuel D. Hunter's Broadway debut, Little Bear Ridge Road, received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play on May 5.

The show, starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock, won Best Play earlier in the week at the New York Drama Critics' Circle.

The Tony judges call Hunter's Little Bear Ridge Road "bitingly funny and quietly explosive … a sharply etched portrait of two people reaching across emotional galaxies - searching for meaning and fumbling toward connection, even as they fear it might swallow them whole. In this piercing and profound new play, the void is vast, the stars are indifferent, and love - messy, human, and hard-won - might be the only thing tethering us to Earth."

Hunter, a 2007 graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and one of American's most-produced playwrights, is no stranger to accolades for his work.

He has received an Obie Award in playwriting (2011), the Drama Desk Award (2013), and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play (2013). He also was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant (2014). Hunter likely is best known for his 2012 play The Whale, which was adapted into a feature-length film starring Brendan Fraser and Sadie Sink and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Hunter wrote the screenplay for the film, which was released in 2022 and garnered multiple award nominations and wins, including the BFCC Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Oscars.

Art Borreca, associate professor of dramaturgy, dramatic literature, and theatre history, co-head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and head of the dramaturgy program, says it's exciting to have another alumnus nominated so soon after 2001 graduate David Adjmi's Stereophonicwon Best Play at the 2024 Tony Awards.

"Sam's play is really wonderful," Borreca says. "Just getting a play produced on Broadway in and of itself is a major accomplishment, because it's very, very difficult to successfully produce a nonmusical play on Broadway these days."

Borreca says the Iowa Playwrights Workshop strives to allow playwrights to experiment with style and to more deeply develop their unique voices.

"One thing I often hear is that our program is particularly strong in nurturing individual voices. There isn't an 'Iowa Voice,'" Borreca says. "I've had literary managers tell me that they can sometimes read a play from a recent graduate and they can tell which program they went to. But with our program, they say there's a wider range of styles and subject matter. And I like hearing that, because we do try to meet the writers where they are."

Borreca says that while Hunter wrote a variety of plays in very different forms and styles while at Iowa, a play he wrote toward the end of his time in the workshop in some ways set the tone for his future work.

"A lot of his plays deal with ordinary people who meet and connect in surprising ways or characters who have been estranged who rediscover each other, which is the case in Little Bear Ridge Road," Borreca says.

Joining Hunter's Little Bear Ridge Road as Tony Award finalists for Best Play are The Balusters, by David Lindsay-Abaire; Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt; and Liberation, by Bess Wohl.

Winners of the 2026 Tony Awards, which recognize excellence in Broadway theater and are widely considered to be the Academy Awards of the genre, will be announced June 7 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. See the full list of Tony Award nominations.