1999
2001 
Production and Director
The Best Production award for 2000 goes to Elizabeth Rex, a world premiere black-box production of a Timothy Findlay play at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Part history lesson and part theatrical insight, this brilliant roller-coaster of passionate peaks and valleys is a complex and literary examination of grief, love, the nature of friendship, and the power of art.
The Best Director award for 2000 goes to Christopher Johnson for his stunning Macbeth at Defiant Theatre, a masterful blend of puppetry and special effects with creepy symbology and demonology in a truly frightening examination of the consequences of guilt. Goblins, demons and goat-headed devils abound in an audacious and bold theatrical styling.
Performance
The Best Actress award for 2000 goes to Diane D'Aquila for her confident and eloquent Queen Elizabeth in the Stratford Festival of Canada's Elizabeth Rex. Brash and opinionated, D'Aquila's Elizabeth commands the stage as she does her kingdom but grows as a person - and matures as a woman - in a poignant reflection on the struggle between royal duty and personal emotion.
The Best Actor award for 2000 goes to Brent Carver for his mercurial Ned Lowenscroft in Elizabeth Rex at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Carver's pox-ridden Ned is the complex core of a play that brilliantly illustrates how a dying man helps an emotionally cold woman become a woman as she helps him to become a true man.
The Best Supporting Actor award for 2000 goes to Peter Hutt as the reflective peacemaker William Shakespeare in Stratford Festival of Canada's Elizabeth Rex. Hutt's gentle Shakespeare, ailing and near death, provides the narrative framework for a memory play as his younger self observes the passion and self-realization around him while he ponders and creates.
The Best Supporting Actress award for 2000 goes to Marion Day as Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, also at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Day's Lavinia, continually victimized and helpless, is a memorably haunting beauty in shaggy black hair and wounded dark eyes, hunched and vulnerable in oversized raincoat and floppy hat.
Technicals
The Best Scenic Design award for 2000 goes to Allan Wilbee for his realistic rural barn setting for Elizabeth Rex at the Stratford Festival of Canada. The elongated wooden stage of the tiny Tom Patterson Theatre teems with activity as the Lord Chamberlain's men toil beneath the jutting beam framework within the murky interior of an English barn.
The Best Costume Design award for 2000 goes to Deborah Dryden for the early-twentieth-century glamour in The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. From a roller-blading clown in hat, bow tie, and suspenders, to a heroine resplendent in scarlet and white, Dryden's elegant design soars with a lavishly costumed ballroom dance beneath a glittering chandelier.
The Best Lighting Design award for 2000 goes to B. Emil Boulos for the strobes and blackouts that punctuate Macbeth at Defiant Theatre, along with the blinding blast of light directly into the audience as the newly crowned tyrant is seated within his throne.
The Best Sound and Music Design award for 2000 goes to Brian and Matthew Callahan for the dazzling variety of effects in Defiant Theatre's Macbeth, including hooting owls, chirping crickets, and rising Scottish winds, as well as on ominous and cinematic original score.