Obie Award
annual theater awards in New York City
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given to theater artists and groups involved in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions in New York City. The Obie Awards are considered off-Broadway's highest honor, similar to the Tony Awards for Broadway productions. The awards were presented by The Village Voice from 1956 to 2020, and have been presented by the American Theatre Wing since 2014.
Background
The Obie Awards were initiated by critic Jerry Tallmer and Edwin (Ed) Fancher, publisher of The Village Voice, who handled the financing and business side of the project. They were first given in 1956 under the direction of Tallmer. Initially, only off-Broadway productions were eligible; in 1964, off-off-Broadway productions were made eligible. The first Obie Awards ceremony was held at Helen Gee's cafe.
With the exception of the Lifetime Achievement and Best New American Play awards, there are no fixed categories at the Obie Awards, and the winning actors and actresses are all 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. Not every category is awarded every year.
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This entry incorporates text from “Obie Award” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.