Beth Hyland learned about the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition almost as soon as she arrived in the Master of Fine Arts program in Playwriting at the University of California San Diego. From the beginning, as she and her classmates were encouraged to apply to the competition, they were also encouraged to see it as an opportunity or better yet a capstone.

“Naomi Iizuka, the head of the program at UCSD, encouraged us to apply,” says Hyland. “She described Kendeda as something to aspire to because it’s this kind of capstone to a graduate program in playwriting.”

For Hyland, that encouragement planted a seed that would grow into a singular goal. So, to be named the year’s winner?

“It’s a dream come true. It’s like a best-case scenario of stepping out of grad school and into the regional theater landscape. New works are risky and expensive. For young playwrights at the beginning of our careers, it’s very easy to get stuck in the workshop pipeline. You get readings, you get development, but the leap from workshop to production can take years—or never happen at all. As a launching pad, Kendeda is the best-case scenario.”

That is also why winning Kendeda with this play, Fires, Ohio, is incredibly rewarding.

Fires, Ohio has already lived many lives. Hyland first began writing the play in 2019, long before graduate school, and over time it has evolved through readings, revisions, and near misses. By 2025, she had made peace with the possibility that it might never receive a full production. Then came the call.

She still remembers the day Amanda Watkins, the Alliance Theatre’s Director of New Works called to inform her Fires, Ohio, was selected the winner.

“I was sitting on my couch when the phone rang,” she remembers. “When I saw the area code for Atlanta on my phone, everything in me went still because I wasn’t sure if the call was to tell me I won or to thank me for submitting my work.”

It’s just the perfect outcome; one that the greatest playwright couldn’t write if they tried.

At its core, Fires, Ohio is a contemporary reimagining inspired by Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, but Hyland is careful to resist the label of “adaptation” as something limiting or exclusionary. In fact, her guiding principle has been the opposite.

“It’s really important to me that people who have never heard of Uncle Vanya can enjoy Fires, Ohio fully. This is not an adaptation where you only enjoy it if you know Chekhov. Theater can already be so exclusionary, and the absolute last thing I want to do is shrink the pool of people who can enjoy the play.”

While audiences familiar with Chekhov may notice resonances and echoes, Hyland insists the play stands entirely on its own. The goal is not reverence, but conversation.

“What I love about adaptation is that you get to be in conversation with an artist you love and admire. You get to argue with them. You get to use them as a jumping-off point. You get to experiment with things that maybe disappointed you in the original work—all while holding real humility for the historical context you’re engaging.”

Hyland’s relationship with Chekhov is deeply personal. During an undergraduate class trip to Russia in 2012, she encountered Uncle Vanya in a way that stayed with her. But it wasn’t the play’s title character that stood out to her, no! It was Sonya, a figure often relegated to the margins of the play. Sonya’s quiet endurance, her generosity, and her sense of being overlooked resonated with Hyland at a moment in her own life when she felt similarly small.

When she sat down to write what would be the initial iteration of Fires, Ohio, Sonya became the focus and protagonist.

“That was the challenge and the joy. How do you make someone without ‘main character energy’ into the center of the story? I love her goodness. I love her purity of heart. Those are aspirational qualities for me.”

Hyland wrote much of the play while working as an administrative assistant at a college, pursuing playwriting alongside a day job that often made her feel invisible. That lived experience infuses the play with empathy for characters who occupy the background.

Humor, too, is central to Hyland’s storytelling. While Fires, Ohio grapples with isolation, loneliness, and unfulfilled desire—feelings made even more resonant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—it is also deeply funny.

“Humor is a massive coping mechanism for me,” she says. “It’s how I make sense of the most painful things in my life.”

She points to Chekhov’s famous stage direction, often translated as “laughing through tears,” as a guiding influence. The characters in Fires, Ohio use humor to connect, to deflect, to wound, and to survive—often all at once.

“What I hope audiences get is a feeling of intimacy. Like you’re sitting at the table with this family, witnessing some of the most romantic, devastating, and life-changing moments of their lives. You get to be a silent observer in moments we don’t usually get to see.”

Just as importantly, she hopes audiences do not arrive feeling that the play isn’t for them. “I hope people don’t think, ‘If I’m not a theater person, or I don’t know Chekhov, I won’t like this,’” she says. “This isn’t inside baseball. You don’t need special knowledge to enjoy it.”

She is also excited to be reunited with this production’s director, Marissa Wolf. The two first worked together during a reading of Fires, Ohio in Portland in 2024. Hyland recalls being immediately struck by Wolf’s leadership, intelligence, and generosity in the rehearsal room.

The production also draws on Atlanta’s deep bench of theatrical talent—something Hyland says became abundantly clear during auditions.

“The level of talent here is bananas,” she says. “The cast is extraordinary, and I think audiences are going to feel that electricity.”

And for audiences gathering in the dark, waiting for the lights to rise on Fires, Ohio, it’s an invitation—to sit at the table, to laugh through tears, and to see themselves reflected in stories that insist everyone, even those in the shadows, matters.

Performances of FIRES, OHIO run on the Hertz Stage February 25 through March 22, 2026 – learn more.