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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Richard Greenberg obituary
The American playwright Richard Greenberg, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was an accomplished and prolific chronicler of the lives of young, upwardly mobile professionals in the 1980s – he himself had first wanted to be an architect. In doing so, he moved American new playwriting on from the era of Sam Shepard and David Mamet; he had no particular axes to grind, and he wrote beautifully. Every time you saw a play of his – he was once dubbed 'the American Noël Coward' – you understood why his household gods were Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton. He was serious, literate, engaging and enlightened. In his breakthrough play, Eastern Standard (1988), he anatomised a yuppie quartet of best friends and siblings sorting out their relationships as they moved from Manhattan to a summer house on Long Island. And he did so in a becalmed atmosphere of guilt-ridden privilege that got some critics' collective goats. I saw Eastern Standard in the same Broadway season as AR Gurney's The Cocktail Hour and Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles. All three plays reverted to classical structure and narrative in middle-class environments turning their backs on Greenwich Village, political protest and scabrous social behaviour. He told the New York Times in 1988: 'The idea that the moral and personal lives of the middle-class do not constitute a subject worthy of consideration is a kind of fascism to me, a censoriousness saying that we know everything there is to know about them.' And it is certainly true that he jabbed and poked beneath the surface of his characters' lives with uncommon skill, revealing complex layers. Many of Greenberg's plays (and there were over 30) were set in Manhattan and the socioeconomic satellites of the Hamptons and the Catskills. But his own personal style and demeanour were secretive, withdrawn, uncooperative. As he admitted in a Daily Telegraph interview in 2009: 'I love the moment when you just have the dress rehearsal, when no one's there; that's kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.' All the same, he won the Tony best play award in 2003 for Take Me Out – world premiered in London at the Donmar Warehouse in 2002 – a play about a major league baseball player coming out as gay that wittily addressed the subject of bigotry and homophobia in sport. Again, he did not tub-thump; he moved gracefully through the arguments. The Donmar had also presented – in 1999 – the clever and absorbing Three Days of Rain (1997), charting the fleshly appetites and passion in two overlapping triangular love stories, with a great cast of Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern and David Morrissey. The play was triumphantly revived on Broadway in 2006 with a trio of Paul Rudd, Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper. Greenberg was born in Green Meadow, Long Island, New York, to Shirley (nee Levine) and Leon Greenberg, an executive for a chain of movie theatres. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in English in 1980 and enrolled in Harvard's doctoral programme on literature before transferring to the Yale school of drama for the playwriting course. There, he wrote The Bloodletters (1984), about a Jewish teenager on Long Island who develops a rare disease that makes him smell like a dirty bathroom. The New York Times critic Frank Rich, a notable champion of his, said that the play was 'so daffily conceived that one must admire its promising author's antic spin of mind even when he is straining too hard'. He signed a contract with the South Coast repertory in California, where several of his plays were first presented. Other important forcing houses in the early days were the Seattle Rep and the Manhattan Theatre club, both springboarding Eastern Standard to Broadway. Patently using James's Washington Square (in its theatrical format of The Heiress), Greenberg wrote The American Plan (1990) as a pungent, melancholic mother and daughter drama of great psychological and narrative ingenuity. Set in the Catskills in the 1960s, it was hailed as 'an absolute cracker' by Michael Billington when receiving its British premiere in 2013 at the Theatre Royal, Bath, directed by David Grindley and outstandingly well-acted by Diana Quick as the Mittel European Jewish refugee and Emily Taaffe as her daughter Lili Adler, a young heiress scarred by mental illness. The last play of his I saw, an extraordinary one, was The Dazzle (2002), presented in 2015 by the Michael Grandage company, directed by Simon Evans, in a pop-up theatre in the former Central Saint Martins school on the Charing Cross Road. The play is based on a true story of two brothers – or at least their decomposing corpses – found in 1947 in their clutter-rammed family home in New York. It had taken a team of people weeks to clear their hoard – books, instruments, newspapers. And it was from this posthumous view of the brothers that Greenberg looked back. He fictionalised what their lives could have been, inspired by the possibilities of how the two men could have arrived in such a sorry state. Andrew Scott played, brilliantly, the eccentric pianist, Langley, David Dawson, equally superb, his accountant brother, Homer. The play was set in a small room with a grand piano – relatively uncluttered to begin with – but as the story unfolded the room began to cramp with crap. A bohemian hostess, played by a beautifully poised Joanna Vanderham, entered their world, almost marrying Langley, then much later almost marrying Homer, before the brothers were left alone, hidden from society, dirty and dying, surrounded by their accumulated memorabilia and detritus. The savagery of these biographies fully exposed the streak of jaundiced melancholia and dissatisfaction running through most of Greenberg's characters' lives, the downside to their wealth and privilege. It is impossible not to deduce there was something of this about Greenberg himself, the fuel to his writing. He is survived by his brother, Edward. Richard Greenberg, playwright, born 22 February 1958, died 4 July 2025
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out' Won a Tony, Dies at 67
Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for 'Take Me Out,' his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67. His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer. A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time. Works like 'Eastern Standard' (1987) and 'The American Plan' (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them. Having once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners? 'We're always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,' Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, 'and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they're wrong.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Los Angeles Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Playwright Richard Greenberg, the Mozart of verbal arias, brought an exquisite fluency to the American stage
Playwright Richard Greenberg was the maestro of shimmering verbal arias. His well-born characters spoke as if they had been transplanted against their will from a Henry James novel to the later 20th century. Their circumlocutions were as entrancing as their ability to find the most precisely ironic words for difficult-to-name realities. Greenberg, who died on July 4 at 67 from cancer, shot to the theater world's attention with a rave New York Times review of 'Eastern Standard.' Of the play's 1988 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, Frank Rich wrote, 'If Mr. Greenberg's only achievement were to re-create the joy of screwball comedies, from their elegant structure to their endlessly quotable dialogue, 'Eastern Standard' would be merely dazzling good fun. But what gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author's ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form.' There was tremendous excitement when 'Eastern Standard' moved to Broadway, where I saw the play as a student the following year. My experience didn't quite live up to Rich's lavish praise, but I was indeed dazzled by Greenberg's New York wit, which struck me as an acutely sensitive, off-angle version of George S. Kaufman's Broadway brio. Anne Meara was the talk of the town in the role of a bag lady who spurned the self-congratulatory charity of guilty swells. But the play also showcased a new generation of acting talent, including Patricia Clarkson and Dylan Baker, two classmates of Greenberg's from the Yale School of Drama who, having been steeped in Shakespeare and Shaw, had no problem delivering the rapid-fire repartee of the play's carefully sculpted dialogue. But it was years later, in 'Three Days of Rain,' that Greenberg more fully realized his gifts. I'm referring, of course, not to the 2006 Broadway premiere that occasioned the publicity earthquake of Julia Roberts' Broadway debut, but the 1997 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, where I saw its unparalleled cast, Clarkson (in even more mesmerizing form), John Slattery and Bradley Whitford. 'Three Days of Rain' was commissioned and first produced by South Coast Repertory. Greenberg, in fact, received more commissions than any other playwright in SCR's history, 10 of which were produced by the theater, along with other of his plays. 'When we made a commitment to undertake a program to support new American playwrights and produce their work, Richard's work stood out,' David Emmes, SCR's co-founding artistic director with the late Martin Benson, said by email. 'This was a writer with extraordinary capability who had great potential. Whatever the subject matter, it was always dealt with in an unexpected way, but always brimming with intelligence and wit.' The characters in 'Three Days of Rain' talk their way into theatrical existence — as much for the audience's benefit as for their own. The adult children of renowned architects who had tragic lives, they're struggling to find a path forward from the wreckage of the past. Slattery's Walker, brilliant and unbalanced, with shades of his mentally ill mother, is the most troubled. He's a constant source of worry for his sister, Nan (Clarkson), who hasn't time to dwell on her own fragility with her brother hyper-articulating his nervous breakdowns. Pip (Whitford), the son of the architectural partner of Walker and Nan's father, is a daytime television actor who has made peace with being highly successful rather than a genius. His ostentatious well-being is scorned by Walker, who equates equilibrium with compromise. But Pip rebukes Walker for 'changing the temperature' of every room by 'tyrannical, psychosocial … fiat.' The play, a diptych, has a second act in which the same actors play the roles of the parents of their first-act characters. Greenberg ironically examines the inscrutability of the past, whose main connection to the present may live in the shared vulnerability to 'error' — the final word in this gorgeously written play. The Broadway revival of 'Three Days of Rain,' not being as confidently performed, revealed a common frailty in Greenberg's dramaturgy — the tendency toward structural abstraction. His plays are held together by thematic ideas James would have put to good use in his novels but are harder to build a dramatic world upon. (Greenberg told me that he dropped out of Harvard's grad program in English and American literature after not finishing James' 'The Princess Casamassima' for a seminar, but his sensibility was the most Jamesian of all contemporary American playwrights.) There are two moments in 'Three Days of Rain' where conversation on artistic matters reveals quite a bit about Greenberg's own relationship to his chosen art form. Nan, invoking Goethe (something not anomalous in a Greenberg play), refers to architecture as 'frozen music' (a lovely description of the play's dialogue) and talks about the way a great building contains something that can't be anticipated by the plan, no matter how scrupulously designed. Walker, finishing his sister's point, explains, 'There's an intuition held in reserve, a secret the architect keeps until the building is built.' Something similarly latent inheres in Greenberg's dramaturgy. Later, Nan, describing the type of play her mother favored when she first came to New York, allows Greenberg to indulge in some delectable self-irony. She tells Pip that her mother would attend one of those matinees 'you could never remember the plot of, where the girl got caught in the rain and had to put on the man's bathrobe and they sort of did a little dance around each other and fell in love. And there wasn't even a single good joke, but my mother would walk out after and the city seemed dizzy with this absolutely random happiness.' That is precisely how I exited Manhattan Theatre Club when I first saw 'Three Days of Rain.' My euphoria stemmed as much from the mandarin eloquence of the characters as from the unanticipated magic that can happen when a playwright finds his community of actors. Greenberg was a prolific writer, which may have been unfairly held against him. I think the bigger issue was that his enormous gifts left many admirers waiting impatiently for his American stage masterpiece, which never quite came together. 'Take Me Out,' about a star baseball player who breaks a cultural taboo by coming out as gay, is the most celebrated of Greenberg's works. Winner of the Tony for best play in 2003, it also won awards for Joe Mantello's direction and Denis O'Hare's performance as gay financial advisor Mason Marzac, who becomes an unlikely rabid baseball fan. There's a breathless monologue in which Mason deconstructs the art of baseball as 'the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society.' One of the great theatrical speeches written in the last 25 years, this vertiginous paean to America's pastime was no doubt a factor in O'Hare's win. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who was in the Tony-winning 2022 Broadway revival, won a Tony for the same role, a testament to a supple comic performer and an evergreen part. I admire what Greenberg attempts in 'Take Me Out,' though I don't think he entirely succeeds. It's not just that the locker-room banter sometimes sounds like a faculty lounge at some competitive liberal arts college. It's that the swirling ideas of the play and the dramatic construction aren't a seamless fit. 'The Assembled Parties,' the title of Greenberg's 2013 Broadway play, is an apt metaphor for the challenge that playwright had in coalescing his sparkling chat-fests into satisfying dramas. So often the whole seemed slightly less than the sum of its scintillating parts. The smaller canvas of the one-act form allowed Greenberg to hone in his theatrical vision. Perhaps this accounts for the enduring success of 'The Author's Voice,' an early Kafkaesque work that literalizes the divide between an artist's primitive side that does the grunt creative work and the camera-ready side that basks in the empty glory. But Greenberg's disappointments could be worth more than other writers' triumphs. He wrote magnificently for actors, endowing them with powers of speech that surpass the capacities of most mere mortals. To hear Judith Light, Jessica Hecht, Linda Lavin, Peter Frechette, Slattery or Whitford converse in this heightened theatrical patois was to become instantly spellbound. Clarkson, in a league of her own, turned the gold of Greenberg's prose into embodied thought and feeling. But magniloquence was hardly the whole story. The vulnerable sound of Slattery's delicate stammer in the second half of 'Three Days of Rain' and the opinionated maternal astringency of Jenny O'Hara in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' at South Coast Repertory point to the various registers of the playwright's wide-ranging vocabulary. Greenberg, a somewhat reclusive personality, stayed away from the spotlight, but was deeply connected to the community of artists who helped him find his voice. Among them, director Evan Yionoulis, another Yale School of Drama classmate, who directed 'Three Days of Rain' at Manhattan Theatre Club and shepherded many other of his plays from development to the stage. 'Rich was a gentle man with an acerbic wit,' Yionoulis wrote via email. 'A keen observer, he wrote about people negotiating their place in the American landscape. Under his always sparkling dialogue, there is a powerful undercurrent of loneliness and longing that reveals his characters' aching humanity — and our own.' The laughter echoes down decades. I can still hear the sisters in 'Everett Beekin,' one of those Greenberg's works I wanted so badly to like more than I did, talking competitively about their upwardly mobile dreams in their mother's Lower East Side tenement. Greenberg captures the postwar ethos in a single line when one of the sister's explains to a visitor that her family lives 'in Levittown for the time being, but later on, you never know.' Greenberg, a native son of Long Island, encoded his social observations about the frenzied real estate hierarchy in comic language that rarely if ever missed its mark.
Daily Mail
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Richard Greenberg dead at 67: The Tony-winning Take Me Out playwright is remembered for legacy on Broadway
Richard Greenberg, the Tony award-winning playwright behind Take Me Out, has died at age 67. Over the weekend, the New York native's death was announced on social media by his friend and theater director Robert Falls. 'Heartbroken by the news of playwright Richard Greenberg's death. For the past several years we've been deep in collaboration on his gorgeous adaptation of Holiday, Philip Barry's great American play — premiering at the Goodman this February. A profound loss mid-process,' Falls wrote on Bluesky. He continued: 'For over 30 years, it's been one of life's great pleasures to know Rich and his writing. Dazzling, humane, wildly funny. … His kindness was real. His loss is enormous.' American actor, Denis O'Hare, who received a Tony Award for his role as Mason Marzac in Take Me Out, shared a heartfelt tribute to Greenberg on Instagram. 'Hard to believe the genius that was Richard Greenberg is no more. I owe him more than I could possibly say,' he wrote. 'He gave me the greatest gift ever--a beautiful character to inhabit in a beautiful play.' O'Hare went on to praise his former colleague for giving him his two best friends, Lisa Peterson and Linda Emond, who he recalled meeting on Greenberg's 'one act play, The Author's Voice, at Remains Theatre in 1987 in a festival of one acts called "Sneaky Feelings."' 'I have a sneaky feeling of grief mixed with gratitude for this man. RIP Rich,' he concluded. At this time, a cause of death has not been publicly revealed. His fans flooded X with tributes as they remembered the late playwright for pushing boundaries and inspiring 'thought for generations to come.' 'Farewell to the playwright Richard Greenberg, of Take Me Out, The Assembled Parties and Three Days of Rain. A lyrical chronicler of the mysteries that are human beings, he understood that the past, far from being another country, is forever a pulsing part of our present,' one tweeted. Another wrote: 'RIP Richard Greenberg, a great American playwright. His work included the award-winning TAKE ME OUT and the superb THREE DAYS OF RAIN. He wrote about everyone from Major League baseball players to upper crust New Yorkers, always with wit and compassion. A major loss.' In addition to Take Me Out, Greenberg is remembered for writing plays as The Dazzle, The American Plan, Life Under Water and The Author's Voice. Take Me Out, which had an all-male cast, followed a baseball star's coming out journey during a season filled of racial tension and violence. He also penned the Broadway adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's and the book for the musical Far From Heaven. Over his career, he had more than 25 plays premiere on, Off-Broadway, and off-off 'Broadway in New York City as well as eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California. Greenberg, who was born in 1958, graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University. He studied creative writing under American novelist Joyce Carol Oates and was roommates with future Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw.
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Richard Greenberg, Tony-Winning ‘Take Me Out' Playwright, Dies at 67
Richard Greenberg, the Tony Award-winning writer of 'Take Me Out,' has died. He was 67 years old. Greenberg's death was announced on social media by collaborators and colleagues such as Denis O'Hare and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who won Tonys for their work in the original 2003 production of 'Take Me Out' and its 2022 revival, as well as director Robert Falls. More from Variety Jesse Williams and 'Take Me Out' Co-Stars Discuss Need for Hot Water in Infamous Shower Scenes Jesse Williams on Baring All Again in 'Take Me Out,' That Leaked Footage and Why He Doesn't Watch 'Grey's Anatomy' 'Take Me Out' Returning to Broadway in October With Jesse Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson 'For over 30 years, it's been one of life's great pleasures to know Rich and his writing. Dazzling, humane, wildly funny,' Falls wrote. 'He was also one of the smartest people I've ever met. But he wore that brilliance lightly—often cloaked in hilarity, or tossed off in the driest, most devastating line at dinner. His kindness was real. His loss is enormous.' Greenberg's plays were known for their wit and sophistication, and covered a wide range of topics, from a pro baseball team reacting to the presence of a gay player in the locker room in 'Take Me Out' to an Upper West Side family grappling with the consequences of their bad choices in 'The Assembled Parties.' Greenberg's work, which includes 'Three Days of Rain,' 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' and 'The American Plan,' was frequently produced on and off Broadway, as well as at top regional theaters. He also wrote a disastrous 2013 adaptation of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,' as well as penned a well-received adaptation of August Strindberg's 'Dance of Death' that brought Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren to Broadway. In addition to winning the Tony for best new play for 'Take Me Out' in 2003, Greenberg was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for that show and for 'Three Days of Rain.' Falls wrote on social media that Greenberg was working with him on a new adaptation of Philip Barry's 'Holiday' that was supposed to premiere next year at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Best of Variety Oscars 2026: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Wagner Moura and More Among Early Contenders to Watch New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts?
