From Bohemian to Bigshot, he soars onstage

"Very banal," is how Donald Margulies describes winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. "I was out of town in Seattle last Monday when the news broke, in an antiseptic, sterile condo that had been provided for me. My publicist called me to make sure I was reachable. I knew that the announcement would be made at three o'clock East Coast time, and I was attempting to do some work." He pauses meaningfully. "When I found out, I called my wife. Then the phone didn't stop ringing for three days."

Sold out, but no copy in Sterling

COURTESY HAROLD SHAPIRO In 'Collected Stories,' a writing professor falls prey to her young student's ambition.

Almost at once, the Brooklyn-born Yale lecturer was bombarded with interview requests from sources as far afield as the New Haven Register and the New York Times, even as his name was added to the tiny pantheon of major living American playwrights. His prize-winning Off-Broadway hit, Dinner with Friends, is an archetypal Margulies play: classically structured, quietly intellectual, concerned with the entrapment (and potential salvation) of marriage among disenchanted bourgeois members of the "boomer generation"—Margulies' usual mise-en-scène. As directed by Daniel Sullivan, it regularly sells out all 640 seats at the Variety Theatre on Third Avenue. Margulies never had more grandiose dreams for it. "On Broadway, we would be struggling," he said. "I've had offers to move, but I haven't taken them."

Margulies was up for the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago with Collected Stories, his play about an old guard Jewish writer, Ruth, who takes on—and is ultimately betrayed by—her young disciple Lisa. It lost to Paula Vogel's more scandalous How I Learned to Drive, a coming-of-age story about a girl who is molested by her uncle during the titular lessons. Most Yalies seem to know Stories best of all Margulies' works, particularly due to the production starring Uta Hagen that played Off-Broadway; Dinner with Friends, meanwhile, is so relatively obscure that Amazon.com demands five weeks to find it. Even Sterling doesn't have a single copy.

A Loman spirit

Although he isn't surprised that Dinner won, Margulies comes across as someone who is too congenial, and spontaneous, to be used to mass publicity. In nearly all of his promo pictures he looks supernaturally poised, writerly and serious. But he only gives me one pre-scripted line that I know from other interviews—"The Pulitzer recognized my whole body of work, not just one play"—and is refreshingly self-deprecating about his success: "After every play I write, I wonder whether I wouldn't be better off opening a restaurant." He enjoys his work— "I always love the thing I'm writing more than anything. It's the only way I can get up in the morning." And the morbid fascination in his plays with the untimely death of Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz—Ruth had an affair with him in Collected Stories and his work appears in several epigraphs—stands in stark contrast to his stable family life. "His tragedy appealed greatly to the romantic in me, the dark side," Margulies explains. "He's a specter of a lost generation."

COURTESY HAROLD SHAPIRO A scene from 'Dinner With Friends,' the play that won Donald Margulies his Pulitzer Prize.

Growing up lower-middle class and Jewish in Trump Village (the Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump's father), Margulies didn't even know he wanted to be a playwright until he got to college. His father Bob, a wallpaper salesman, whom Margulies likened to Willy Loman (and who appears in spirit in several of Margulies' plays, perhaps most notably The Loman Family Picnic), spent most of his free time listening to Broadway musical records. Margulies notes that one of his most formative experiences was going to "The City" (i. e. Manhattan) on family vacations to see week after week of shows. He went to the Pratt Institute to study visual arts, but after a disenchanting year-and-a-half he transferred to SUNY-Purchase to pursue playwriting in earnest.

Back in New York City, he collaborated with Joseph Papp in the early '80s—"a real visionary; no one else is doing what he did," Margulies notes—and produced his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, at the Public Theatre. He had his major breakthrough in 1992 with Sight Unseen, an Obie award-winning play that, like Dinner, considers the causes and effects of a romantic break-up, and also, presciently, examines the consequences of artistic fame. He also had his major disaster during his only appearance on Broadway with What's Wrong with this Picture. "It was an abomination, a debacle," Margulies says. "It was like a snowball rolling out of control, with enormous money, public scrutiny and producers deferring to directors they shouldn't have." Despite any youthful inspiration it may have provided, Margulies now maintains a dark view of Broadway as "a reductive theme park kind of venture for out-of-towners."

After Hell's Kitchen, New Haven's vampires

Although his playwriting career may play like a Cinderella story, Margulies' path to Yale lacks the same kind of facile romance. Abandoning a bohemian life in Hell's Kitchen, he came to New Haven as a "faculty spouse," following his wife to Yale Medical School in 1983, stayed around when she received a fellowship, and applied to teach a college seminar in 1990. He began to teach playwriting and screenwriting at the Drama School a few years ago; his undergraduate production seminar first entered the Blue Book last year. "That's what's so funny about all these newspapers identifying me with Yale," Mar-gulies says. "I have no academic background at Yale. I don't even think I would have gotten into Yale."

Margulies says he enjoys teaching undergraduates more than Drama School students—"They're more adventurous, more willing to absorb ideas"—and that he finds the exchange of ideas inspiring. Yet, as Ruth in Collected Stories relates, the true aims of professors are often far more insidious than they'd like to admit. When she describes the appeal of teaching to Lisa, Ruth portrays it as predatory: "I'd want them, like a vampire wants fresh blood." Margulies hedges about how much he resembles Ruth. "Is the student-teacher relationship vampiric? I suppose it is," he said. "But I'm certainly not as dogmatic or narcissistic as Ruth." And how much do his students resemble starry-eyed Lisa? "Young writers are often in love with writing, with the romance of writing, not the practical sitting down stage of it. The romance of ideas can be very seductive, the actual act of writing is more difficult," Margulies said.

The students from Margulies' seminar seemed to feel that the workshop atmosphere provided just the right blend of work, critique, and encouragement. But, like the little vampires they are, when Margulies took them to see Dinner with Friends on a recent Sunday, most came back with mixed reviews. "It was a nice little diversion for the afternoon, but it wasn't very profound," said a current student who asked to remain anonymous. "He does deserve credit for staying in the theater, though."

Glowing, yet realistic

Margulies, it seems, is in no danger of leaving. When he received news of the Pulitzer in Seattle, he was attending the premiere of his next play, an adaptation of Sholam Asch's 1907 melodrama The God of Vengeance that originally began at Long Wharf. Margulies has updated the language and the setting, from tsarist Prussia to the Lower East Side, and is incorporating his trademark themes into the drama: the misunderstandings between families and lovers and the experience of Jews in New York. He will also take part in the Asch conference at Yale in May.

Right now, Margulies is celebrating the afterglow of Pulitzer-dom by churning out a new project: a two-part teleplay for an NBC mini-series based on Tom Wolfe's bestseller, A Man in Full, slated to appear in the fall. "Bonfire of the Vanities was a botch," he says about the Brian De Palma film. "I met with Tom Wolfe once, and he did not want to know about [the mini-series]. He was very gracious, very friendly, but I knew that I was on my own, as it should be." Despite his Pulitzer, and the unproduced feature screenplays he has written for Robin Williams, Bette Middler, and Oliver Stone, Margulies remains realistic about his career. "I may yet be replaced. They eat writers for lunch in Hollywood," he says. "The theater is where I can really soar as a writer." For the time being, Dinner with Friends beats doing lunch anywhere else.

Photo of Donald Margulies courtesy Harold Shapiro.

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