Transcript
Jan Simpson (0:00)
Summer fun goes great with family freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones, all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16 128GB8 2,999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile the year is 2000. People around the world are celebrating the new millennium and breathing a sigh of relief that a feared Y2K bug hadn't caused computers and software systems to go crazy as their calendars flipped into a new century. But there is new anxiety as the dot com boom that had fueled a nearly decade long bull market turned into a dot com crash as investors realized that many Internet companies were worth far less than they've been saying they were, with some even going bankrupt. Meanwhile, both liberals and conservatives are talking about marriage, education for poor people, and the effect of divorce on children families at all income levels. And in that year of 2000, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Donald Margulies Dinner with Friends, a deceptively simple drama about how a divorce between one couple can ripple out into the kindred partnerships, friendships and other connections that tie people to one another. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Donald Margulies had been a finalist for the Pulitzer twice before he finally won the prize. His winner, Dinner with Friends, focused on two upper middle class couples, but most of Margulies earlier works involved Jewish themes, working class characters and the often uneasy relationships between parents and their grown children, all reflections of his own upbringing as a lower middle class Jewish kid dreaming of a more sophisticated life than the one in which he grew up. He was born In Brooklyn on September 2, 1954, the second son of Charlene and Bob Margulies, a wallpaper salesman. The Margulies household wasn't a wealthy one and the parents weren't intellectuals, but they did revere the theater. Bob Margulies regularly brought home and played the cast recordings of hit Broadway musicals, and the family sometimes went to sea shows which were then still affordable for a family of four willing to sit high up in balcony seats twice instead of using their annual vacation to visit some historic site or to relax at one of the upstate summer camps that were popular with many Jewish families back then. The Margolis took the subway into Manhattan, checked into a reasonably priced hotel, and spent a week cramming in as many shows as they could see. Margulies remembers that he was about nine when he saw his first non musical. It was Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns, with Jason Robards as a free spirit forced to choose between getting a traditional job or losing custody of his beloved nephew. It made a lasting impression. The young Margolies started reading plays soon after that and was particularly taken by Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, maybe because its main character, Willy Loman, reminded him somewhat of his own salesman father. But Donald still spent most of his time drawing, which had always come easily to him, and when it came time for college, he went to Pratt Institute, planning to focus on becoming a visual artist. It didn't take long for him to realize that the conservatory approach at Pratt wasn't a good fit for him, so he transferred to SUNY Purchase, where he still majored in visual arts. But he also worked up the courage to pursue his secret desire to write plays by approaching Julius Novick, who taught dramatic literature at the school, and asking Novick to teach him about playwriting. Novick took Margulies under his wing and remained a mentor for years. After graduation from Purchase, Margulies supported himself as a freelance graphic artist and later as an art editor at Scholastic magazine, while he continued to write plays and tried to get them staged. His first professional production was a one act adaptation of a short story by the writer and poet Delmore Schwartz that was commissioned by the Jewish repertory theater in 1982. The next year that company staged his first full length play, Gifted Children, which centered on a pregnant woman who had been raised by a single mother and who now has to decide if she should have an abortion and pursue the career she wants or make the same sacrifice her mother did. The New York Times critic Frank Rich didn't think much of Gifted Children. He called it amateurish, but the play caught the attention of Gail Merrifield, the literary manager at the Public Theater and the wife of its founding producer, Joe Papp. They thought Margulies showed promise, and in 1984 the public staged his play Found a Peanut, about a group of kids who find a bag of money buried in the backyard behind the Brooklyn tenements where they lived. Frank Rich wasn't crazy about that one either, but lots of other people liked it and the play launched Margulies. He soon joined the stable of young writers who found a home at Manhattan Theatre Club. And he began to be produced in other parts of the country, too. What's Wrong with this Picture? A fantasy about a Jewish mother's return from the Dead, opened at MTC in 1988. The Lohman family Picnic, which centered around a Jewish boy's bar mitzvah and whose title paid homage to Arthur Miller's play, opened there in 1989. And the model Apartment, a drama about the relationship between Holocaust survivors and their troubled daughter, premiered in Los Angeles in 1988. But the big breakthrough for Margulies came with Sight Unseen, a play about the tense reunion between a successful artist and his former lover and one time muse. It had been commissioned by South Coast Republic in Costa Mesa, California, and opened at MTC in 1992. And this time even Frank Rich had good things to say. The play quickly transferred for a commercial run at the Orpheum Theater, running for a combined total of 293 performances. It was also named a Pulitzer finalist four years later. In 1996, came Collected Stories, a two hander about the complicated relationship between a famous writer and her protege. That is one of my personal favorites of Margulies's plays. That year's six member Pulitzer jury liked it, too. They put Collected Stories on their shortlist for the Drama award, along with Tina Howe's Pride's Crossing and Alfred Urie's the Last Night of Ballyhoo. But the Pulitzer board, which has the final say on all Pulitzer awards, ignored the jury's recommendations and declined to give the prize to any play that year. And then came Dinner with Friends. It centers around Gabe and Karen, professional food writers, who introduced his best friend, a lawyer named Tom, to her best friend, an artist named Beth, when they were all in their 20s. Now, 12 years later, Gate and Karen are horrified when they learn that Tom and Beth are separating. And they're frightened about what that divorce might mean for their own marriage, their ties to their friends, and their sense of who each of them has become. Dinner with Friends premiered at the Humana Festival of New American plays in 1988 and then made a stop at South Coast Rep before opening Off Broadway at the Variety arts Theater in 1999, where it ran for 654 performances. It won the New Play Award from the American Theatre Critics association, the Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off Broadway Play, and of course, it won the Pulitzer. But love, marriage and friendship are universal concerns and productions of Dinner with Friends have been staged all over the world, including in London, Berlin, Stockholm, Vienna, Mumbai, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. In 2001, Margulies adapted the play for a movie that ran and that is still available on HBO, with a starry cast that included Andie McDowell as Karen, Dennis Quaid as Gabe, Toni Collette as Beth, and Greg Kinnear as Tom. In 2014, Pam McKinnon directed a well received revival for the Roundabout Theater Company that featured Marin Henkel as Karen, Jeremy Shamos as Gabe, Heather Burns as Beth, and Darren Petty as Tom. Through it all, Margulies has continued writing, producing such notable works as Brooklyn Boy, Time Stands still, the Country House, and just earlier this year, Lunar Eclipse. He has also maintained an active teaching life as a professor of English and theater at Yale. So I was very grateful when he agreed to take time from his very busy schedule to talk with me about Dinner With Friends. Hello, Donald Margulies, welcome to all the Drama.