Luna Park: Short Plays and Monologues

by Donald Margulies

Award-winning playwright Donald Margulies is “literate and intellectually stimulating” ( New York ) and “a playwright of the most unusual imaginative power” ( New York Post ). Luna Short Plays and Monologues collects Margulies’s best short plays and monologues spanning three decades. Taken as a whole, the work is an extraordinary representation of a particularly American reality of the twentieth century. His language is exquisite and deceptive in its simplicity, wherein the larger questions of our daily existence emerge and are clarified.

Includes July 7, 1994 , hailed at its premiere by Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune as “a powerful drama about a new and devastating age of anxiety in the United States”; Pitching to the Star , a darkly comic look at the writers’ lot in Hollywood; Luna Park , an elegiac look at the American past and the immigrant experience, inspired by a short story by Delmore Schwartz; and many more short works.

Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends . The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance , his many plays include Collected Stories , The Country House, Sight Unseen , The Model Apartment , The Loman Family Picnic , What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still . Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

Born in Brooklyn in 1954, Donald Margulies grew up in Trump Village, a Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump's father. Margulies was exposed early to the theatre. His father, a wallpaper salesman, played show tunes on the family hi-fi and, despite a limited income, often took his children to Manhattan to attend Broadway plays and musicals.

Margulies studied visual arts at the Pratt Institute before transferring to State University of New York to pursue a degree in playwriting. During the early 80s, he collaborated with Joseph Papp, and his first Off-Broadway play, Found a Peanut, was produced at the Public Theatre. In 1983, he moved with his wife to New Haven, Connecticut, so that she could attend Yale Medical School.

In 1992, Margulies' career really began to take off when Sight Unseen won an Obie for Best New American Play. Some of his other plays include The Loman Family Picnic; Pitching to the Star; Zimmer; Luna Park; What's Wrong With This Picture?; The Model Apartment; Broken Sleep; July 7, 1994, and The God of Vengeance. Dinner With Friends--which tells the story of a seemingly happy couple who re-examine their own relationship when their best friends decide to divorce--won Margulies a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He had previously been nominated for a Pulitzer for Collected Stories, a play about a Jewish writer who is betrayed by her young disciple.

Elected to the Dramatists Guild Council in 1993, Margulies has received grants from Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His plays have premiered at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Repertory, The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Jewish Repertory Theatre. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.