Donald Margulies' play, Dinner with Friends, which debuted at the 1998 Humana Festival, opened Off-Broadway this season. Another of his plays, Collected Stories will be receiving a West End debut, starring Helen Mirren. Mr. Margulies' other plays include Sight Unseen (Obie Award for Best New American Play, Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Drama Desk Award nominee, a Burns Mantle"Best Play"); The Loman Family Picnic (Drama Desk nominee, Burns Mantle "Best Play"); Pitching to the Star (included in "Best American Short Plays 1992-93"); Found a Peanut; Zimmer; and Luna Park (inspired by "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz). What's Wrong With This Picture? was produced on Broadway in 1994. The Model Apartment, for which he received a Drama-Logue Award when it was first produced at Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1988, had its New York premiere at Primary Stages in 1995; and won the Obie Award and was nominated for both the Drama Desk and the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Awards.
The Mark Taper Forum commissioned Broken Sleep, a one-act musical written with Michael-John La Chuisa, to accompany his long one-act, July 7, 1994, which itself was commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville and premiered in ATL's Humana Festival of New American Plays in 1995. Broken Sleep: Three Plays is slated to premiere at the Williamstown theatre Festival in the summer of 1997, and his adaptation of Sholom Asch's Yiddish classic, God of Vengeance is scheduled to debut next season at Long Wharf Theatre.
Mr. Margulies' plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre. He has won grants from CAPS, The New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A collection of his work, Sight Unseen and Other Playshas been published by Theatre Communications Group. Mr. Margules is a member of New Dramatists and was elected to the council of the Dramatist Guild in 1993. He has been a playwright-in-residence four times at the Sundance Institute Playwright's Lab in Utah, and a frequent contributor to the 52nd Street Project.
He lives with his wife, Lynn Street, a physician, and their son, Miles in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.
