Donald Margulies

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
describes his inspirations and aspirations

As both a teacher in a Yale playwriting course and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Donald Margulies practices what he preaches. Margulies, who is a lecturer in both the theater studies and English departments, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his play "Dinner with Friends." He has written more than a dozen other plays -- including "The Loman Family Picnic," "Collected Stories" and "Sight Unseen" -- which have been produced in New York, in regional theaters throughout the nation and, for the past several years, in cities around the world. He also won Dramatist Guild and Obie awards, and was a Pulitzer finalist twice before winning last year. His Obie-award winning play "The Model Apartment," is currently playing at the Long Wharf Theatre. The Yale Bulletin & Calendar met with Margulies recently to talk about his work. The following is an edited transcript of that talk. Has winning the Pulitzer Prize changed your life at all? It changed my life in that more people are asking questions about it, and more people ask me about that than seem to be interested in what I have to say. It's nice to have the pretext and the definition of "Pulitzer Prize winner." It means that all of my other plays were written by a "Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright," which is very nice. It does certainly validate the body of work, in a way that I find very gratifying. Is it in any way a burden? I suppose it certainly could be, or turn out to be a burden. I think it has been a burden to other writers who have been awarded the prize. ... Sometimes this kind of recognition comes too soon. It may come for an outstanding work, but it comes before the writer really has had a chance to establish himself or herself, or a real sense of his or her own voice, or point of view as a writer. I've seen it derail people as much it has defined people. With any public professional prize, there's always a sense of one having earned that prize. As I have said very often, it's used for a single distinguished work or, at other times, I think there's a sense of honoring a career. I'm not saying "Dinner with Friends" wasn't worthy of the honor. I'm just saying that it came at a time when I would have proven to the establishment that I'm here to stay, I wasn't a flash in the pan. ... I was a finalist in 1992 with "Sight Unseen" and again in 1997 for "Collected Stories." I suppose it was a sense of progression, momentum. Speaking of "Sight Unseen" ... That play is about a successful artist -- a painter. How autobiographical was it? I wrote "Sight Unseen" probably around 1989-90, and it had its premiere in '91. It started out as a different play, something called "Heartbreaker," which was a much more patently autobiographical play, and had a much more readily recognizable alter-ego, a struggling artist, who was based on me. ... Consequently it was not a terribly interesting play ... After a period of time I revisited the play and decided to make the character a super successful artist. That galvanized the play and separated the character from the author. It was no longer about me. It was an extrapolation from personal experience instead of an attempt to recreate personal experience. ... That play turned out to have been the breakthrough for me. But at the time I wrote it I could only have speculated on success. Your earlier plays were often set in Brooklyn, where you grew up. But it doesn't figure much in your more recent plays. Is Brooklyn a key to reading a certain progression in your plays? I think all of our childhoods are inescapable, and to me the Brooklyn upbringing will reside with me always no matter where I am. I think it's true of all of us. No matter how far we go from home, we are the product of that upbringing, for better and for worse. It defines our world view. It gives us a frame of reference. It gives us things to honor and things to rebel against. It's all there, and for me it was Brooklyn, which is more a kind of metaphor almost than a place. Thematically I think I have always been interested in the effect of time on relationships and how loss figures into our lives and how it's sort of a natural part of the process of experience -- that loss is always co-mingling with change and experiences. I think that's in virtually every thing I've ever written. Incidentally Brooklyn figures in my new play -- for the first time in years it has reared its head again. I hope I'll be handling it in a fresh way, but it seems to be presenting itself to me in this play. Does the Brooklyn of your childhood still exist? I think the Brooklyn of my childhood doesn't exist any more, and I don't think it probably existed then. The mythology of Brooklyn -- of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field -- is really of my parents' generation, and it's part of that very hallowed nostalgia that was completely exhausted by the time I came around. Ebbets Field was leveled for a housing project. I remember visiting Steeplechase Park, the amusement park. The one and only time I was there was right before it was shut down. So even though there's the patina of nostalgia that surrounds Brooklyn, it wasn't there for me. The nostalgia was there but the reality wasn't. It was all in the past tense. Do you think there's a new generation of theater-goers? That's a worrisome topic, because I don't know that there is, necessarily. I think stars, frankly, help get people into the theater. People will be exposed to theater so long as there's a star who has lured them there with their live presence. That can attract a young audience. But I don't know that people are electing to go to the theater, when there's so much out there that vies for their attention. ... At the time I was growing up as a lower-middle-class kid in the '60s, going to the theater was still acceptable, and it was still considered an event. Your plays can be excruciatingly funny. Do you use the device of black comedy intentionally? It certainly isn't intentional. I believe there's humor in almost any situation. I'm not a joke writer. I'm an observer of behavior more than anything. I think people are funny, but I couldn't tell a joke if my life depended on it. In something like "The Model Apartment" the humor -- such as it is -- comes out of placing these particular characters in a fairly heightened, absurd, painful situation and just seeing what happens. Just improvising and seeing how they deal with this environment, how it changes their relationship to one another. Part of the thrill of being a playwright is that you can play, literally play, with these notions and see what arises from them. In "The Model Apartment," now at the Long Wharf, an elderly couple arrives at what they expect to be their retirement home in Florida, only to find that it's just a showplace, that nothing is real and nothing works. When writing the play, did you start with the absurdity of such a situation and build from there? I think it goes back farther than that. The impetus for the play came out of a long friendship with one of my oldest childhood friends, who is a child of Holocaust survivors. Having grown up close to him and to his family, I could see his parents getting older and now in their sunset years retiring to Florida -- these people who have endured the camps and survived the war years in such unbelievable horror. I just began tracing the arc of their particular experience, and seeing it go from the abject horror of the 1940s and into approaching retirement in Florida in the '80s, which is when this play was first written. The writer in me marveled at the bizarre juxtaposition that occurs in the space of 40 years, not even a whole lifetime. To think that these people would endure that catastrophe and live long enough to contemplate retirement in Florida, among the palm trees, is a very stunning idea to me, and I think that's really where the play began. How did you get the idea for the couple's daughter, the obese, out-of-control Debbie? What interested me when I was putting the story of Lola and Max together is the sense of their child -- that which they spawned -- being a receptacle of all of their dreams and hopes and all of their nightmares. ... There's a photograph taken by Diane Arbus that was an inspiration for me when I was putting the play together in my head. I think it's called "A Jewish Giant at Home in the Bronx." It was of this actual giant, a seven and a half-foot man, stooped by curvature of the spine and his own monstrosity, leaning on a cane, hovering over his tiny middle-class Jewish parents in this very mundanely furnished apartment in the Bronx, where his head is grazing the ceiling. There was something so powerful and poignant to me about this little couple in this very banal environment looking with awe and pity and horror at this monstrous child of theirs, and it became a very potent parallel for the play for me as it coalesced. Do you write movie scripts as well as plays? I've written screenplays for about a dozen years or so, which has helped subsidize my playwriting. ... I am hired to write the movies. Even if they don't get made, I'm hired to write them. What are some differences between writing screenplays and plays? The sorts of plays I write usually consist of beats of dialogue linked by what one hopes are seamless transitions. If you're doing it right, the audience is not aware of going from Thought A to Thought B. It just seems like the way people speak. In film you don't need that seamless transition, because you can cut, literally cut, from one moment to another or one locale to another, so that there's greater economy, in a sense, in screen writing, but it's much more about structure, about the building blocks of telling the story. I'm always looking for visual cues for supporting the stories in writing screen plays, because the medium permits it. And it's enjoyable, coming up with ironic counterpoint to storytelling. ... I find that when I'm adapting material for film, I get to use a different part of my brain as a problem-solving tool than when I'm writing plays, which tend to be much more personal stories, but at least I'm able to use my skills as a writer. I enjoy writing screen plays. It's just that they don't emanate from the same source. Do you prefer writing plays? I love writing plays. For me when a play is produced it's a kind of reward to be in a room with people who are bringing your work to the stage, because I'm alone so much of the time, when you think about it. And it's great to suddenly have committed, talented actors, really being faithful and rigorous, really breathing oxygen into these characters. It's great fun to do that. What are you working on now? I've made the first stab at a new play, which is called "Brooklyn Boy," at least the working title is "Brooklyn Boy," just to give you a sense of it. I am looking forward to having some concentrated time to work on it. I'm working on some film assignments right now, doing a production rewrite on a movie, and I'm doing yet another polish on the Tom Wolfe miniseries [of "A Man in Full"] that I've been working on what seems like most of my life. -- By Dorie Baker T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S Team learns how hepatitis C virus recruits cells' RNA 'Art for Yale' charts growth of gallery's collections Ten honored for their work promoting town-gown relations Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright describes his inspirations and aspirations Center offers programs in uncommonly taught languages Study: Teens' reputations offer clue to their risk-taking behavior Yale Rep serving up cocktail of hope and cynicism in 'Big Night' Author Styron defends decision to confront the taboo in his fiction Exhibit of photographs shows Yale as 'a place of changes' Annual film festival to take place at campus sites and nearby venues Symposium will explore 'trends in machine learning' Concerts feature works by Yale composers that integrate computer technologies Medical Library exhibit examines the evolution of microscopes Creative Arts Workshop pays tribute to Yale artists in exhibition 'Administrative Professionals' Day to be celebrated April 25 and 26 Bulletin Home|Visiting on Campus|Calendar of Events|In the News|Bulletin Board Yale Scoreboard|Classified Ads|Search Archives|Deadlines Bulletin Staff|Public Affairs Home|News Releases| E-Mail Us|Yale Home Page