MURPHYSBORO ARTISTS RECEIVE STATE FELLOWSHIPS

MURPHYSBORO, Ill. -- A playwright and a blacksmith from Murphysboro have won $7,000 fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council.

David Rush and Richard Smith were among 40 Illinois artists receiving awards in the first round of fiscal year 2001.

Awards of $280,000 were made to artists working in crafts, ethnic and folk arts, playwriting/screenwriting and visual arts.

Rush, the head of the playwriting program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, applied for the fellowship by submitting his play "Police Deaf Near Far." The play is loosely based on an incident in which miscommunication between a police officer and a deaf man during a routine traffic stop has fatal results. "These kinds of events apparently happen to the deaf community all the time," Rush said.

A recent production was mounted in Chicago, and the play is considered for the SIU stage in 2002.

Rush has written plays for the stage for nearly 20 years. Other Rush works that have been produced include "The Prophet of Bishop Hill," whose subject was a 19th century religious leader much like Waco's David Koresh, the Civil War drama "Leander Stillwell" and "Cuttings," a dark contemporary drama about a sex offender and a 17-year-old boy.

All of his plays are about people in crisis but have a comic sense as well, Rush says. "I describe myself as a Eugene O'Neill/Simon. "They have O'Neill's dark, intense vision and sense of honor and the sense of irony Simon does."

The fellowship "gives me affirmation that my work is important and serious and worth something," Rush said. "It certainly gives a psychological career boost."

Smith received his fellowship in the crafts category and calls himself a contemporary blacksmith. Earlier this year exhibited his functional and nonfunctional sculptural forms in a show at Gallery100 in Cape Girardeau.

An assistant professor of metalsmithing and blacksmithing at SIU, he has shown his work internationally and nationally, including the high-end craft shows mounted by the Smithsonian Institution and by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.