PORTLAND – The award-winning play by the Maine Humanities Council, “Taxing Maine,” recently earned its third national award, the Schwartz Prize, from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. The Schwartz Prize is given annually to an outstanding public humanities initiative that uses innovative approaches to provide cultural programming to large and diverse audiences.

The Maine Humanities Council has received a total of three national awards for the play, which was commissioned in 2006 to educate and involve the public in the conversation about Maine taxes. “Taxing Maine” visited more than 30 venues in Maine in 2006. The program received the Award of Merit and the WOW award from the American Association for State and Local History. “We are truly proud of the awards Taxing Maine has won,” said Erik Jorgensen, executive director of the Maine Humanities Council.

The Council recently added “Taxing Maine” to its Humanities on Demand series of podcasts. “We are pleased now to be able to present ‘Taxing Maine’ to people who weren’t able to see it when it toured the state,” added Jorgensen. “Taxes continue to be a big issue in Maine. We hope this podcast will continue the discussion we began during the original tour of the play.”

The podcast, which can be found at www.mainehumanities.org/podcasts/index.html, is a 30-minute long two-man program, written by David Greenham of the Theater at Monmouth. The program features comical snapshots of Maine’s taxation history beginning with the early Grange movement and running through everything up to the 2006 referendum, the “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.”