Donald Margulies was born in 1954, and grew up in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. His father was a wallpaper salesman with a love for musical comedy. As a family treat, he would take his children to Broadway shows across the river in Manhattan, an expensive outing for a man with a fairly modest income. But economic caution was trumped by his love of theater—an affection he communicated to his son.
Margulies’s early creative interests were in drawing and draftsmanship, and he began his college education at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, a school whose curriculum emphasizes the visual arts. But, as he declared in an interview in Bomb magazine, “I started to itch to write and read; and [Pratt] wasn’t the place to be if I had those inclinations.” As a result, he transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase, a campus that offers courses in all the arts, thus allowing Margulies to satisfy his literary “itch.” There he majored in playwriting.
In 1984 Found a Peanut was staged at the Public Theater, his first play to be produced Off-Broadway. Since then he has written more than two dozen plays, including Sight Unseen, which won an Obie (short for “Off-Broadway”) Award for best new American play of 1992, and Dinner with Friends, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2000.
Collected Stories was first produced in New York at the Manhattan Theater club in 1997, having received an earlier production in California in 1996.
Like the character Ruth in Collected Stories, Margulies is also a teacher—in his case a teacher of playwriting, in the English Department of Yale University.
About Collected Stories he says that, “its themes cross cultures. Mentors and protégés exist everywhere. Most people . . . have known what it’s like to be a student or a teacher, a child or a parent. . . . Most people have felt betrayed or committed betrayal, deliberately or unknowingly.”
Although both characters in this two-character play are writers, Margulies insists that this is not a play only about writers. “[I]t is primarily a play about how human beings try to engage one another, pass along traditions, fulfill the powerful need for family. I have always been interested in the ways that we create families out of our friends or acquaintances. . . .”
Margulies’s early creative interests were in drawing and draftsmanship, and he began his college education at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, a school whose curriculum emphasizes the visual arts. But, as he declared in an interview in Bomb magazine, “I started to itch to write and read; and [Pratt] wasn’t the place to be if I had those inclinations.” As a result, he transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase, a campus that offers courses in all the arts, thus allowing Margulies to satisfy his literary “itch.” There he majored in playwriting.
In 1984 Found a Peanut was staged at the Public Theater, his first play to be produced Off-Broadway. Since then he has written more than two dozen plays, including Sight Unseen, which won an Obie (short for “Off-Broadway”) Award for best new American play of 1992, and Dinner with Friends, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2000.
Collected Stories was first produced in New York at the Manhattan Theater club in 1997, having received an earlier production in California in 1996.
Like the character Ruth in Collected Stories, Margulies is also a teacher—in his case a teacher of playwriting, in the English Department of Yale University.
About Collected Stories he says that, “its themes cross cultures. Mentors and protégés exist everywhere. Most people . . . have known what it’s like to be a student or a teacher, a child or a parent. . . . Most people have felt betrayed or committed betrayal, deliberately or unknowingly.”
Although both characters in this two-character play are writers, Margulies insists that this is not a play only about writers. “[I]t is primarily a play about how human beings try to engage one another, pass along traditions, fulfill the powerful need for family. I have always been interested in the ways that we create families out of our friends or acquaintances. . . .”