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player ready...Three set designers chosen as the first recipients of the Michael Merritt Award for Excellence in Design and Collaboration will be honored April 18.
The winners are Linda Buchanan, who received a 1993 Jeff Award for set design for the Goodman Theatre’s “Black Snow”; Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, who has designed more than two dozen Broadway plays, including “American Buffalo,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Any Given Day”; and Michael Yeargan, faculty member at the Yale School of Drama and resident designer at Yale Repertory Theater.
The award is named for a highly regarded Chicago designer and teacher who died of cancer at age 47 in 1992.
“I think a lot of people regarded Michael Merritt as their best friend, which is an unusual quality for a person to have,” Michael Maggio, associate artistic director at the Goodman and chairman of the Michael Merritt Endowment Fund, said last week.
“I remember he once said that he had been born in South Dakota and felt he was a person of the prairie, and that Chicago was an appropriate place for him to design. There’s something about the horizons and size of the prairie that matched Michael as an artist and as a person. He had an enormous capacity for understanding and a great, great vision-sometimes a frustrating vision, because he was very hard on himself and his work.”
The awards reception will be held at 5:30 p.m. at Piatti, 215 W. North Ave. Reservations for tickets, priced at $25, may be made by calling 312-663-1600, ext. 287. In conjunction with the awards, a student seminar on set design will be held at 1 p.m. April 18 in Columbia College’s Getz Theater, 72 E. 11th St., with the three recipients participating. The seminar is free and open to all theater design students. (For more information, call 312-663-9462.)