Dinner with Friends (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Donald Margulies was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954. He grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island, middle-class Jewish community. His father, who sold wallpaper in Brooklyn for a living, loved plays and movies and took his family to Broadway shows almost religiously. Margulies saw his first Broadway play at the age of nine.“Religion was show business,” he said in a conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth of PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.“We didn’t go to synagogue, but we went to see Hello, Dolly.”

Margulies attended Pratt Art Institute and then transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase, where he attained a B.F.A. in visual arts. For a time he supported himself as a graphic designer and a comedy writer before turning his full attention to play writing. Margulies wrote several plays, which were all produced (but with little fanfare). He was contemplating giving up play writing right before his play Sight Unseen (1991) became a surprise hit of the season. This same play, about an artist who struggles to let go of his past, went on to win an Obie Award for the best new American play as well as to become a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992.

A play that some critics think is Margulies’ best, Collected Stories (1996), tells the story of a young fiction writer who eventually eclipses her mentor’s accomplishments by writing a story about her mentor’s life. This play was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Award for outstanding new play. It was also chosen as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1997. Although he did not win the prize for Collected Stories, three years later in 2000, his play Dinner with Friends did finally win Margulies the Pulitzer.

Margulies has won numerous awards and has enjoyed passing on his techniques for writing by giving seminars at the Sundance Institute Playwrights’ Lab in Utah, as well as teaching classes at Yale in playwriting and screen writing. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his eight-year-old son, Miles, and his wife, Lynn Street, who is a doctor. He and his wife have been married for twenty-one years, and Margulies says that the play Dinner with Friends reflects the changes and the challenges of longtime relationships such as his and his wife’s as well as the complications and consequences he has witnessed when friends’ relationships have fallen apart.

Writing a film adaptation of Dinner with Friends, which Norman Jewison will direct for HBO films, is currently keeping Margulies busy. He’s also writing a television adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, and, in addition, he is working on the production of his new play, God of Vengeance, which is based on a classic Yiddish story written by Sholem Asch in 1906. It’s about a Jewish father who houses a brothel in his basement while his family lives upstairs and his attempts to try to keep the two separated.