Lis Harris

Posted on April 25, 2011 by daysofyore

Lis Harris is the author of three books, Holy Days: the World of a Hasidic Family, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Rules of Engagement; and Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Freeze. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where she worked for over two decades. Her writing has also appeared in publications like The New York Times, The World Policy Journal, Du and the Wilson Quarterly.

Harris is the recipient of a great many grants and awards, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gund Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Kaplan Fund, the Fund for the City of New York, and the Woodrow Wilson Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Harris is direct but warm, shrewd but encouraging. She has a sharp tongue and a mischievous eye.

When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a little girl I didn’t want to be anything, I just wanted to play ball. I was a tomboy. I had no overarching ambitions. But I was headed toward being an artist, a painter. In my family, my brother was the writer, and I was the artistic one. Totally designated. My brother is six years older than I am and he became a correspondent, very early, for The New York Times. We are so different that I thought, “That’s what a writer is, and I’m definitely not like that.”

I could never do what my brother did for his entire life—to go out for a few hours, come back to a desk, write it, and it’s done. For me, there is a lot of dream-time involved; thinking, wandering, changing my mind. And, actually, I think I write to find out what I think. I’m not one of those people who knows in advance what I think before I write, not really. But even when I was young, I was a bookworm and avidly attentive to the stories people told about their lives.

Did you write in college?

I wrote poetry and I majored in what was called, at Bennington where I went to college, Language and Literature. I was the co-editor of the literary magazine…I mean, words were always my playground, I kept diaries and sometimes a journal . . . but I had this preconceived idea that that realm was already taken; that I was the artist.

So I minored in art. I was surrounded [in college] by people who were going to be artists, for whom this was their world. I enjoyed drawing and painting, but it wasn’t my true language. But I didn’t follow that out, or think, “Oh, I’m a writer,” because I had this fixed idea, even through college.

What did you do when you graduated from college?

There was a magazine in Switzerland, it still exists, called Du—it’s literary and a graphic designer’s dream. I decided sometime during my senior year in college that I wanted to work for Du. I kept writing them letters over many months, but they weren’t answering me. At all. I had gotten a job as a mother’s helper with a wonderful family who traveled all around Europe: England, Paris, the South of France. When they went home [to America], I stayed [in Europe] since I was waiting to hear from this magazine—though I was clearly never going to.

I had no money at all. My parents were not approving of any of this. I had a boyfriend in the States whom I didn’t want to borrow money from. Someone had given me the number of an editor of an art magazine which was then based in Zurich called Art International. I called him [the editor] from Paris. I told him I had been writing to Du and that they were not answering. He laughed and said, “Everyone wants to be there. You don’t have a chance in hell.” Parenthetically, several decades later I got a call one afternoon when I was in my office at The New Yorker from an editor at Du in Switzerland, asking me to write an article about I.B. Singer for them, which I did.

Anyway, I took a deep breath. I so wanted to stay in Europe—I wanted to be where my parents were not, where my boyfriend was not, where institutions that wanted something from me were not . . . I just wanted to be there [in Europe], figuring myself out, by myself, in a different culture. I absolutely wanted that. So I asked him if he needed any help at Art International, and he said, “I don’t think so.” So I said, and I don’t even know where I ever got the brass to do it but I did this, I said, “Well, I’m going to be passing through Zurich tomorrow, why don’t I just come talk to you?” What this meant is that I had to cash in my boat-train ticket to go back to America, buy a ticket to Zurich, stay up all night . . .
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Jennifer Egan

Posted on April 19, 2011 by daysofyore

Jennifer Egan is one of the finest American writers working today. Her most recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the 2011 LA Times Book Prize for fiction. It was also a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. Her other works of fiction are: The Invisible Circus, which was made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001; Look At Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; and The Keep, which was a national bestseller.

Egan’s fiction has appeared in publications like The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, and McSweeney’s, and she regularly contributes nonfiction to the New York Times Magazine. She received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award in 2002 and the NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2009. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Egan is as disarmingly forthcoming as she is disconcertingly smart. She also has one of the best author’s web sites out there.

When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.

It attracted you?

It did, kind of. I was interested in corporeal strangeness. I wish I could tell you it was about making people well, but I think it was more about wanting to cut them open!

But you lost that interest?

I did. I would just add that I was deeply interested in biology and physiology. I would read about that on my own time. I felt like it wasn’t covered enough at school— I went to this girls’ school and I was like, “I want to hear more about the human body!!”

This was probably nine to thirteen, fourteen. When I became a teenager I got very squeamish, and that interest totally disappeared. That squeamishness— and I’m sure you could read lots of interpretations into that— was almost a fear of the body. Just a fear of seeing what was in the body. I remember being really afraid of seeing blood. I’m not really like that anymore, but I don’t feel neutral about it. I look away if I’m getting a shot.

No more doctor. Then what?

At that point I became really interested in anthropology and I really wanted to be an archeologist. I thought that was a for-real goal, actually. I applied to Penn. I got into the anthropology department, but I specifically wanted archeology. It was the seventies and a lot of exciting things were happening, discoveries in archeology. It was a moment when that felt more present in the culture than it is now.

I took a year off between high school and college and it was kind of funny— I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services. I think none of them answered me except for one, who said, “You know, our graduate students actually pay us to go on digs. So, obviously, this is not appropriate.” It was a nice note, but basically saying: “This is never going to happen.”

Then I actually paid to go on a little dig, which was in Southern Illinois. They were digging up Indian remains. It was essentially the kind of thing the professor was describing to me only it was open to the public. So I went, and what I discovered was that what I had imagined archeology to be bore little resemblance to the actual experience.

How so?

In my imagination, it was kind of digging up big chunky urns with a shovel! [Laughs.] But what one so often neglects to account for from the outside of any job is the tedium— and I include writing in that. It was a square meter of earth, it was 99 degrees, it was the end of summer in Illinois. We used a scalpel. We couldn’t unearth— that was the thing that really bugged me. You had to lower the earth until the object was sitting on top of it! You couldn’t dig it out! It’s called a dig, but you couldn’t dig!

By October I knew that I probably didn’t want to be an archeologist.
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JK Simmons

Posted on April 18, 2011 by daysofyore

JK Simmons gets all the coolest jobs. A working actor/singer on and off Broadway into the early 90’s, he moved to the screen to try his luck at movies. Since then, he has appeared in over a hundred films and TV shows alongside some of the most well-respected names in the business, and has made a name for himself as a versatile and iconic character in a full spectrum of genres.

You’ve seen Simmons on the big screen in Juno, Up in the Air, I Love You Man, Burn After Reading, For the Love of the Game, and Spiderman (to name just a few). He also appears in The Music Never Stopped, an independent film by Jim Kohlberg released at Sundance this spring. He has enjoyed an eclectic TV career, ranging from his role as Assistant Chief Will Pope in The Closer and neo-Nazi Vern Shillinger in HBO’s Oz to parts on The Simpsons and Party Down. Oh, and he’s the voice of the yellow M&M.

Simmons graduated from the University of Montana where he acted, sang, and composed, then went on to attend Ohio State University before acting in New York, Seattle, and Bigfork, Montana at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse. He currently lives in L.A. with his wife, the director Michelle Schumacher, and his two children, whom he describes as “adorable.”

You’ve had a pretty cool acting career in film and TV – was this your plan all along?

I was completely uncalculated – just going from one thing to the next because it’s what I liked to do. I started out in New York, waited tables for a year and then started finally getting a couple of jobs; one thing just led to another. But the media was such a different world then, I was doing nothing but theater for the first twenty years.

And theater was just a natural inclination?

I sort of stumbled into doing summer stock in Bigfork (Montana) and I thought, “Well this is really cool. It’d be great to be able to do this for a living, and maybe I’ll teach school nine months a year and do summer stock for the rest of my life.” And then I decided that I hated teaching so, I decided to try and act full time. But it was really such an incredibly gradual climb from 60 bucks a week doing musicals in Montana to you know, giant budget movies in L.A., and it was a series of serendipitous meetings with everybody from Don Thompson [Bigfork Playhouse manager] to Sam Raimi.

So what happened? What changed?

Well, I was lucky enough to meet a few different casting directors in New York when I was doing theater there. They got me doing some regional stuff, and then I started doing some Broadway casting and this and that. And then I was doing my fifth Broadway show in a row and obviously doing okay, but, living in New York, all I was doing was paying the rent. So I told my agent, “Once this show is up and running, I don’t want to look for another play, I’d like to get the TV and movie thing going.” Got a couple of auditions, and one of them turned out to be a thing that lead to a big guest spot on Homicide, which six months later led to Oz. And suddenly I was in the middle of a pretty big transition.
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Stephen Elliott

Posted on April 11, 2011 by daysofyore

Stephen Elliott is a novelist, memoirist, and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online cultural magazine The Rumpus. His Daily Rumpus messages, which the site describes as “overly personal emails from Stephen Elliott” and readers describe as both soothing and addictive, currently land in well over six thousand subscriber inboxes every day.

Elliott has written eight books. The most recent, a collaboration with Eric Martin, is Donald (McSweeney’s, 2011), a novel that imagines the interrogation of Donald Rumsfeld at the same overseas military facilities that he approved during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense under the second Bush administration. Donald was released in January, on the same day as Rumsfeld’s own memoir, and was described by The Washington Post as a “daring and risky” work of both humor and humanity. Prior to that, Elliott’s memoir, The Adderall Diaries (Graywolf, 2009) was lauded as “genius” by both the San Francisco Chronicle and Vanity Fair; his novel, Happy Baby (Picador, 2004) was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsday, Salon.com, and The Village Voice. Elliott’s stories and essays have also appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006.

Elliott grew up in Chicago. He holds a degree in history from the University of Illinois and a master’s in cinema studies from Northwestern University. He was a 2001 Stegner Fellow and the Marsch McCall lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University. He currently lives in San Francisco.

In one of your Daily Rumpus emails, you talked about being at a recent writing conference and described the beginning writers there as “absurdly earnest and likable.” I’m wondering how you might have been described as a beginning writer?

Well, as a beginning writer, I wouldn’t have been at a conference. I didn’t do an MFA, I didn’t have a literary community, except that I would do open mics and poetry slams. So I knew some of the slam poets, but I wouldn’t ever have been at a conference.

As a beginning writer—you know, I started writing a lot when I was about ten—I wrote a lot of poetry, and it was really angry poetry. I was twenty or twenty-one when I started writing short stories. The poems just got longer and more narrative and became stories. Then I wrote a novel, and then I wrote two more novels, and I had written three books before I really started to know other writers and became a part of a literary community.

I don’t think I would have been described as earnest, though. Bitter. Cynical. Yearning for something unknown. That would have been the more apt description. Impatient. You know.

Bitter, cynical, yearning—how has that changed along the way?

One thing is that there are no more pedestals for me. I don’t think, “I love this person’s art, and therefore this person is superior.” I don’t put anybody on a pedestal anymore, and I don’t have any desire to be on a pedestal. Back then, I really wanted to be on a pedestal, because I thought then people would love me, that if I was—if I somehow created something that showed I had more talent than other people, that I was better at something than other people, then that would be worthy of love. I no longer think that makes you worthy of love. The things that make you worthy of love are kindness and engagement with the world. Which is not to say you shouldn’t have ambition, or that I don’t enjoy competition. [Shrugs.] I play fantasy football. But this idea of stratification, where the students are in one house and the teachers are in another house, that doesn’t have any interest for me. I don’t want any of that. But I did want that—and I’m not saying I’ve ever achieved it, I just know that I wanted it, and I don’t anymore.
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Sylvia Waters

Posted on April 4, 2011 by daysofyore

Sylvia Waters is the Artistic Director for Ailey II, the junior company of the renown Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which she has led since its inception in 1974. Waters was hand-picked by Alvin Ailey to lead the new venture and under her direction Ailey II has grown into a powerful company in its own right. Prior to joining the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a principal dancer in 1968, Waters lived in Paris and worked with Michel Descombey, then director of the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as Milko Sparembleck. She performed at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City in 1968.

Waters received her Bachelor of Science degree in Dance from Juilliard. In 1997, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York at Oswego and in the spring of 2010, she was a guest lecturer in dance at Harvard University.

Waters has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts as well as for the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2008, she was awarded the Legacy Award as part of the 20th Annual IABD Festival, Syracuse University’s Women of Distinction Award, and the prestigious Dance Magazine Award.

Were you a child who danced all the time?

I was a child who moved. I was a child with a lot of energy. My mother started me off in piano lessons. So, my physical outlet in addition to piano was sports. Running track was my favorite. Playing basketball. And it was in junior high school that I began to get on the dance track.

How?

In our phys ed classes we had what I called “The General” for a phys ed teacher. We wore these gym suits and we had to get dressed in a minute and a half, then at the end you had to undress….all in a minute and a half! She was all about discipline. The fascinating thing about her was that she never wore a gym suit herself. She was always wearing the most wonderful suits and high heels.

We had these little things called tap bags sewn onto our gym suits. We would put these taps on the bottom of our sneakers and she [the General] would teach us time steps. You know, it took me years to realize how she did that in her high heels. She had obviously danced at one time. She also started an after school modern dance class. It wasn’t called modern dance, it was called interpretive dance.

Then I had a girlfriend, my best friend, who was studying dance at the New Dance Group. She had one of those no-bones bodies. She kept telling me, “You’ve got to come down to the New Dance Group, you really should come.” She’d show me the exercises, the floor work in her little room and I said, “Oh God, this hurts, I can’t do this…”

So all of these signals were coming to me. Even the kids that I baby-sat for, I would take them to dance class on Saturdays and I would watch them do their tap class and their jazz class and their ballet class. So it was all around me, but it wasn’t until my first year of high school, when I saw that there was a choice of gym or dance.

And you chose dance?

Yes. I went right into dance. And it was there that I really began to experience dance movement. I had a teacher who was, I guess, very interested in her students– as you would hope all teachers would be. She would bring in books and wonderful pictures of dancers, modern dancers, all kinds of dance. She finally said to me one day, “You really seem to like this a lot and you seem really good at this, have you ever thought of studying seriously?” The light bulb somehow came on and I went down to the New Dance Group, just as my friend had suggested, and that’s when it started.
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Michael Scammell

Posted on March 28, 2011 by daysofyore

Michael Scammell is a distinguished biographer and translator. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography (1984) and, most recently, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (2010), which won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography in the USA, and the Spears Magazine Award for best biography in the UK. He is also the editor of Russia’s Other Writers (1971), Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union (1977), and The Solzhenitsyn Files (1995). His translations include The Gift and The Defense, by Vladimir Nabokov, Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, by Leo Tolstoy. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, AGNI, and Harper’s.

In 1972, Scammell founded Index on Censorship, for which he served as editor until 1981. He received his B.A. from Nottingham University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he now teaches nonfiction writing.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A soccer player.

Why?

I grew up in working class England, and sport seemed the obvious route to fame and riches. My father was a good amateur soccer player and we kids spent all of our waking hours playing soccer, listening to soccer on the radio, and occasionally getting taken to a professional game on a Saturday. But in high school I realized I was one of the smallest people on the pitch, so that faded.

Once the soccer dream faded, where did you set your sights?

I really had no idea. I got to a good high school through pure chance – one of only two from our village in my year – and found myself in a place where they studied Latin, French, German, math, history, geography – a full range of academic subjects – and it turned out I was good at nearly all of them.

But I paid a price. My school was an hour away, students who went there were considered to be “stuck up snobs” by the boys in the village. I was cut off from my friends and no longer understood by even my father, a plumber, or my mother, a former chambermaid – though they were very proud of me. I guess it was the start of what would now be called alienation.

What did you do after you graduated high school?

The only thing I had to cling to was something my English teacher said to me in exasperation one day. “Scammell you’re too facile with your words. Have you ever thought of trying journalism?” I hadn’t the slightest idea what I would do after leaving school at the age of 16 – which was the norm in those days – so, I thought, why not? I sent out about forty letters to every single newspaper within a radius of sixty miles whose names I found in a press directory and got one offer back: to work as a copy boy, that is, messenger boy, at a daily paper in nearby Southampton. But I was warned I wouldn’t be allowed to write a word for the newspaper, and so it turned out, with the exception of about six brief items in a gossip column.

How long did you do that job?

Two years. Luckily I was befriended by the paper’s theatre critic, who asked me to babysit for his children and invited me to stay over at his apartment because I lived too far away to get home. I had the run of his bookshelves and it was like Aladdin’s cave to me. For my birthday he gave me Candide by Voltaire. He introduced me to the writers known as the “Angry Young Men” – Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Philip Larkin, and so on. He also lent me books by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and took me to the theater, so that was the beginning of my real education, I would say.
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Karen Hartman

Posted on March 21, 2011 by daysofyore

Karen Hartman is an award-winning playwright and librettist whose work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Helen Merrill Foundation, a Daryl Roth “Creative Spirit” Award, a Hodder Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship to Jerusalem, a New Dramatists residency, and Core Membership at the Playwrights Center. Her play Goldie, Max, and Milk premiered this season at Florida Stage and the Phoenix Theater, and Wild Kate opened at ACT in San Francisco. Goliath, Donna Wants, Gum, Going Gone, Anatomy 1968, Troy Women, ALICE: Tales of a Curious Girl, Leah’s Train and others have been commissioned and/or staged by dozens of theaters including the Women’s Project, NAATCO (National Asian-American Theater Company), McCarter Theater, ACT in San Francisco, Center Stage, the Magic Theater, and Dallas Theater Center, and are published by TCG, DPS, Backstage Books, NoPassport Press, and Playscripts, Inc.

She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. She has taught playwriting in a wide range of settings, including four years at the Yale School of Drama. Karen is a resident alum at New Dramatists and leads an independent writing workshop for New York playwrights.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Probably when I was about three. I would narrate what was happening to me and my friends in my head. I took great pride in writing with a pencil. I started writing plays in junior high. My friend Amy and I decided to write an absurdist comedy called Anhedonia Meets The Urban Shaman. We pulled whatever we were studying and put it in the play.

Do you remember the first time you saw your work produced?

It was very formal and official. The first play I wrote myself was for the California Young Playwrights Festival. I acted in this festival when I was fourteen in a play by an 8th grader, which gave me a lovely low standard so that I could have the courage to write my own play. My first two plays were produced there when I was in high school. I had an early and totally false sense that playwriting was a road to success and fame and getting into college. It was a comparatively good and glamorous beginning.
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Bianca Marroquin

Posted on March 14, 2011 by daysofyore

Bianca Marroquin is one of the first Latinas to appear in a leading role on Broadway. She began her career in Mexico City, appearing in the Mexican productions of Beauty and the Beast, Rent, Phantom of the Opera, and Chicago, in which she starred as Roxie Hart, a role that garnered five awards from the Mexican Critics Association, including New Revelation and Best Actress. She starred in the U.S. national tour of Chicago, and can currently be seen as Roxie in the Broadway production in New York.

Marroquin has also appeared as Daniela in the Broadway production of In the Heights, and as Carmen in Pajama Game. In 2009, she returned to Mexico to play the role of Maria in The Sound of Music.

In 2004, Marroquin was awarded the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, making her the first Mexican to receive this award. She was also the youngest Roxie ever to appear on Broadway.

Were you one of those kids who was always performing and goofing around?

Dancing was my world. When I was little I always wanted to dance. I made my mother take me to ballet when I was three years old.

How did you even know about ballet at three years old?

Well, actually, I remember watching the Olympics. What I really wanted to do was gymnastics— when they danced on the mat, all that. I would tell my mom: I want to do that! When my mom took me to a ballet school, I walked in and said, “Where are the bars?” I remember asking that.

I grew up in a very small town in the Northern part of Mexico, at the border to Texas. A lady had just come to our town to open a ballet school. She came from the capital, she came from Mexico City. So, all of the mothers were taking their little kids to the school.

When you were little, did you want to be a prima ballerina?

For the longest time, that was the goal. That was what the teacher imposed on all of us: ballet, ballet, ballet! And I was so disciplined. Ballet always came first, before, like, going to birthday parties or anything like that. I remember making my mother drive to the birthday parties at night, after my ballet class. I would ring the doorbell and say, “Oh, Señora, I come for my little bag of candy! I couldn’t come to the party but—”

You wanted your goody-bag.

That’s right!
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Woody Jackson

Posted on March 7, 2011 by daysofyore

Woody Jackson is an immensely popular American painter, best known for his “cowmania” — paintings of cows in farm landscapes. You may be familiar with his cows from the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream carton and T-shirt images, which he designed for the then new ice cream company in the 1980s. It all started after he graduated from college in 1970, when he lived on a farm with some friends, surrounded by cows. His colorful canvases of cows — set in both rural and urban landscapes — are iconic throughout Vermont and many parts of the United States.

Jackson earned his BA from Middlebury College and his MFA from Yale University. He is the father of five boys and lives in Middlebury, Vermont with his wife Ingrid and their youngest sons, Eben and Silas.

At what point did you realize you wanted to be an artist?

I didn’t know that I wanted to be an artist until I got to college. I think that the era encouraged people to not take the usual routes or go into general business. The time period encouraged the creative type. It was the ’60s, and people were experimenting with a lot of drugs and lifestyles, and everything was up for grabs. Everything was changing.

And printmaking was one of your earliest art forms, correct?

Yes, I did printmaking. I didn’t start until my junior year [in college]. I started making things on my own my freshman and sophomore year. My Junior Fellow had a big influence on me. He was an art major, and he ended up doing special effects art for movies in Hollywood. Because of him, I started playing with lights and designing rock posters. Then, my junior year, I took a design course, and senior year, I took all of the studio art courses available: printmaking, figure drawing, and painting. I didn’t start early on with studio art. I graduated as an Asian and African history major.

Did you ever consider other professions?

No, I never seriously considered other professions. I was lucky in that I had success, enough success, to lull me into thinking that this could work. I was lucky that I didn’t have any student loans to pay, and rent was so cheap it was ridiculous. So I could live for fifteen years on very little money. And I didn’t get married or have children young, which allowed me a lot of freedom.

At the beginning of college, I thought I would go into the Foreign Service or something. But after I graduated, I moved onto a communal farm with like-minded, back-to-the-land people. They were all interested in crafts. Quite a few of them became artists: painters, weavers, and pottery makers. Well, in the short term anyway.
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Donald Margulies

Posted on February 28, 2011 by daysofyore

Donald MarguliesDonald Margulies is an award-winning American playwright and professor at Yale University. His most recent work, Time Stands Still, premiered last year and enjoyed a critically-acclaimed run on Broadway with Laura Linney and Eric Bogosian in the starring roles. His 2000 play, Dinner with Friends, went on to win numerous awards (including the 2000 Pulitzer Prize), and received lengthy runs Off-Broadway and in Paris, as well as productions all over the world. It was also turned into an Emmy-nominated film for HBO.

Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalists Sight Unseen and Collected Stories, as well as Brooklyn Boy, Two Days; God of Vengeance, The Model Apartment (Obie Award winner), The Loman Family Picnic, Found a Peanut, Luna Park, and What’s Wrong with This Picture?, which was produced on Broadway in 1994. Margulies is the recipient of the 2000 Sidney Kingsley Award for outstanding achievement in the theatre by a playwright and is a member of the council of the Dramatists Guild of America. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2005 he was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with an Award in Literature and by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture with its Award in Literary Arts.

When you were growing up, what did your parents do for a living?

My father sold wallpaper at Pintchik’s on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn for over forty years; my mother was a housewife for the first ten years of my life, before going back to work as a bookkeeper and, later, as an office manager in an advertising agency. Neither were college graduates, nor were they intellectuals, yet they were mavens for popular culture. I have said that my family didn’t go to synagogue but we went to Broadway, and that more or less sums it up. I recall many Sunday mornings when my father played cast albums on the hi-fi. My mother died, suddenly, when she was fifty-one and I was twenty-three, so she missed out on my struggles and successes; my father lived to see my off-Broadway debut, Found a Peanut, at the Public Theatre in 1984, but passed away three years later, well before I had my breakthrough (Sight Unseen, in 1992).

Were they supportive of you pursuing a career in the arts?

My parents [never] undermined my artistic ambitions. By the time of her death in 1978, my mother knew I had shifted my concentration from graphic design to playwriting but had few opportunities to see if I had any talent.  Still, she supported my decision unequivocally. My father never truly understood why or how I did what I did but he never questioned it. (Despite assumptions to the contrary, Manny Weiss, the father in Brooklyn Boy, is not a stand-in for my father.) Both my parents were present at my debut as a playwright, when I was 21, and still an art student at Purchase. It was a seminal event in my life and I am grateful that they were in attendance on the night I decided to be a playwright.
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