Warwick writer wins competition

Warwick - A full-length play by Donna Spector of Warwick has been awarded first place out of more than 500 submissions in a competition at Ohio State University. The playwright will be honored at a staged reading on Saturday, July 24, at the university’s performance center in Columbus, Ohio. “Not for the Ferryman,” the prize-winning drama, is a love story about the meeting of two cultures, Crete and Appalachia. In an assisted living facility in the Catskill Mountains two elderly women, Thea Tomadakis and Oriah Peabody, meet and as their friendship develops, so does the unexpected love between Thea’s son Nikos and Oriah’s granddaughter Trout. Interwoven through the “real” time and place of this story are folktales from these ostensibly disparate cultures. Spector, recently retired from teaching English at Vernon Township, N.J., High School, has had many plays produced Off Broadway, regionally and in Canada, Ireland, Scotland and Greece. She has received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study in Greece, as well as grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. A poet as well as a playwright, she will give a reading from her new book, “The Woman Who Married Herself,” at Warwick’s Albert Wisner Public Library on Aug. 10.