Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 14, 2000

Volume 28, Number 28

Donald Margulies wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Donald Margulies, an award-winning playwright and Yale faculty member, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama this week for "Dinner with Friends," a play about how a married couple's divorce affects their friends.

Margulies is among at least five individuals with connections to Yale who received Pulitzer prizes for 2000. David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University professor who won the prize in history for "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45," received his M.A. in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1968, both from Yale. Lewis Spratlan, who won the prize in music for "Life is a Dream, Opera in Three Acts: Act II, Concert Version," received his B.A. from Yale College in 1962 and his M.M. from the Yale School of Music in 1965. J.R. Moehringer, the Los Angeles Times' Atlanta bureau chief who won the prize for feature writing, received his B.A. from Yale College in 1986, and Mark Schoofs, the Village Voice reporter who won the prize for international reporting, received his B.A. from Yale College in 1985.

"I am thrilled not only by the recognition for this play, but for a whole body of work," Margulies said from Seattle, where his re-creation of Sholm Asch's controversial "God of Vengence" is being performed.

Margulies has taught playwriting at the School of Drama and now teaches screenwriting to undergraduates. His Pulitzer is only the most recent in a series of awards and honors that includes two Obies, a Dramatist Guild Hull-Warner Award and a Lucille Lortel Award. Two of his plays have also been Pulitzer finalists, and several have traveled throughout regional theaters and to Europe.

Among his celebrated works are "Collected Stories," "Sight Unseen" and "The Model Apartment." His two-character play "Collected Stories," a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, concerns the relationship that develops between an established older writer and her young aspiring protegé as their respective careers wane and rise. Partly inspired by the true story of a dispute between the poet Stephen Spender and the young novelist David Leavitt, "Collected Stories" explores the element of betrayal often involved in creating a work of fiction.

As with many of his plays, his 1992 Obie Award-winning "Sight Unseen" uses flashbacks to delineate the dissolution of a relationship or a critical moment of a character's development. In traveling from the present in England to Brooklyn 15 years earlier, the play not only reveals the ways in which the paths of two lovers -- one, a very successful painter, the other a relatively obscure academic -- have diverged, but also how the artist, whose reputation alone commands high prices for his work, "sight unseen," has changed.

Obie Award-winning "The Model Apartment" uses the surreal setting of a "model" condo in Florida to explore the tragi-comic fate of two Holocaust survivors seeking refuge -- unsuccessfully as it turns out -- from their deranged daughter. The parents are haunted by the specter of another daughter, of the same name, who did not survive the Holocaust. The unappetizing character of the American born Debbie -- the very embodiment of an unrestrained libido -- is an especially Kafkaesque element of the play. Both the lithe "model" daughter, Deborah, who appears in the play as a dreamlike ghost, and the obese, too-much-of-the-earth Debbie are played by the same actor.

A native of Brooklyn, Margulies has mined his own childhood for several of his plays. "The Loman Family Picnic," which is often excruciatingly funny, dramatizes the unraveling of a family in Coney Island. "What's Wrong with this Picture" is a kind of gothic tale set in an apartment house in Brooklyn, the typical milieu of a mid-20th-century working-class Jewish family.

Margulies did grow up in such a family, where Broadway shows and movies were as much part of the cultural landscape as potato pancakes and bar mitzvah parties. Despite his interest in the theater growing up, his bachelor's degree from SUNY Purchase was in graphic arts rather than playwriting. Indeed, Margulies supported himself as a graphic designer as he made his way as a comedy writer.

In addition to the Pulitzer, "Dinner with Friends" has won raves from critics and audiences. Concerning the impact on a married couple of the divorce of two friends, the play has particular resonance among members of the "boomer" generation for whom friendship frequently forms as tight a bond as family. The play, which exposes the undertow of repressed desires and unrealized dreams endemic to any marriage, ends up as a celebration of monogamy and long-time intimacy.

Much to the amazement of its author, who didn't think the French would "get it," "Dinner with Friends" enjoyed an unprecedented success in Paris. He reported his experience watching the play take shape in French through its very positive reception in an article in The New York Times.

Margulies makes his home in New Haven. He is married to physician Lynn Street and has one son, Miles.

Not one to rest on his laurels, Margulies has many commitments in the works. Seeing his television adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" to completion is just one of them.

-- By Dorie Baker

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Donald Margulies wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Broadway redesign project wins architecture award

Four students win contests for aspiring entrepreneurs

Study tracks second illness caused by ticks

Telemundo chief executive will visit as Gordon Grand Fellow

El Greco will be the focus of Yale painter's Rand Lecture

Rep offering explores culture through music, dance, stories

Student competition will unite an ancient mythical character and robots

Puente enjoys spotlight during visit as Chubb Fellow

Award-winning novelist discusses the art of writing and reading

Leonard S. Doob, a specialist on ways of resolving conflict, dies

'Visionary' student wins award for his work with homeless people

Neurologist Fuki Hisama is honored for her research on aging syndrome

Library acquires papers of noted Caribbean novelist

Lectures will explore emerging trend of 'personalized' medicine in drug industry

Salmonella injections may improve treatment of cancer, study finds

Artists will talk about their cutting-edge works

DMCA event to feature 'sonic world'

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