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The highly acclaimed new play by the author of Sight Unseen and The Model Apartment .
115 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
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180 people want to read
About the author
Donald Margulies
40 books30 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
June 6, 2022
Collected Stories focuses on the relationship between teacher and student, particularly in the world of creative writing, where an established writer mentors a developing writer, usually in a creative writing program. It raises questions about authorship, too: Someone tells you a story--Is it now your story to tell in your own way? When I was in a creative writing program I read Bonnie Friedman’s Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distractions, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. In it she poses the question of whether you can tell intimate family or friend stories you know. Should you hold back out of respect for your family or friends? Eff that, Friedman says; a writer’s allegiance is to the truth, and must tell the best story she can tell.
Collected Stories is a play about Ruth Steiner, an aging, well-established and critically acclaimed upper west side Manhattan author of short stories who never wrote about her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, and Lisa Morrison, a student of Steiner's who, after publishing an also acclaimed first short-story collection under Steiner's direction, follows up with a novel that draws upon the Schwartz affair. In the play, Steiner essentially gives Morrison the advice that Friedman writes, and Morrison takes it. She doesn’t mean to hurt Steiner, she intends to honor her in the process, and she tells a good story. Gossip as literature? Maybe. But Morrison couldn’t have become the writer she was without Steiner.
The affair with Schwartz becomes a topic of discussion when the two argue about the Woody Allen-Soo Yi story, and Ruth defends Allen to Lisa’s mystification; Lisa knows much about Ruth’s past and guesses the Schwartz story, and gets Ruth to tell it to her. This short affair was the most important relationship of Ruth’s life, coming at the bitter, crazy end of Schwartz’s life (also written about by Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift). Early on in her career and as a much younger woman Ruth “supports” the “great [male] artist” in his fading brilliance and his drunken insanity. Why did young women in mid-twentieth-century willingly become “muses” to addicted tortured romantic crazy male artists, from Picasso to Hemingway, Kerouac, Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, and so on?
Serendipity has me reading also Manhattan writer Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: Lust Without Reason, about her own relationship with a drunken, supposedly talented writer, Jack Richardson. But she writes in general about that time for women in New York, who saw their roles as flaming the literary and artistic fires of so many men. Limited women’s roles they happily accepted for a time. Roiphe grew up to write many books herself, extricating her from her own youthful compulsion, but she doesn't apologize for her youthful self; she struggles to help us see how it all could have happened, as does Margulies, through Ruth.
I also once told an intensely personal story of my life to a student who wrote a story about it, and sent it to me. I was initially hurt and told him so. I no longer feel hurt, and know it’s a good story. But initially I felt a slap.
I thank my friend Kathy who acted in this play in Chicago and loved it, as a former English teacher, too, and urged me twenty years ago to read it. Thanks, Kathy. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes.
I learned that the play began as a kind of meditation on the real-life conflict between poet Stephen Spender and novelist David Leavitt.
I see at a glance that not everyone loves this play, but for reasons above I connected to it. And it really flows, great talk, raising so many questions.
Collected Stories is a play about Ruth Steiner, an aging, well-established and critically acclaimed upper west side Manhattan author of short stories who never wrote about her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, and Lisa Morrison, a student of Steiner's who, after publishing an also acclaimed first short-story collection under Steiner's direction, follows up with a novel that draws upon the Schwartz affair. In the play, Steiner essentially gives Morrison the advice that Friedman writes, and Morrison takes it. She doesn’t mean to hurt Steiner, she intends to honor her in the process, and she tells a good story. Gossip as literature? Maybe. But Morrison couldn’t have become the writer she was without Steiner.
The affair with Schwartz becomes a topic of discussion when the two argue about the Woody Allen-Soo Yi story, and Ruth defends Allen to Lisa’s mystification; Lisa knows much about Ruth’s past and guesses the Schwartz story, and gets Ruth to tell it to her. This short affair was the most important relationship of Ruth’s life, coming at the bitter, crazy end of Schwartz’s life (also written about by Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift). Early on in her career and as a much younger woman Ruth “supports” the “great [male] artist” in his fading brilliance and his drunken insanity. Why did young women in mid-twentieth-century willingly become “muses” to addicted tortured romantic crazy male artists, from Picasso to Hemingway, Kerouac, Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, and so on?
Serendipity has me reading also Manhattan writer Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: Lust Without Reason, about her own relationship with a drunken, supposedly talented writer, Jack Richardson. But she writes in general about that time for women in New York, who saw their roles as flaming the literary and artistic fires of so many men. Limited women’s roles they happily accepted for a time. Roiphe grew up to write many books herself, extricating her from her own youthful compulsion, but she doesn't apologize for her youthful self; she struggles to help us see how it all could have happened, as does Margulies, through Ruth.
I also once told an intensely personal story of my life to a student who wrote a story about it, and sent it to me. I was initially hurt and told him so. I no longer feel hurt, and know it’s a good story. But initially I felt a slap.
I thank my friend Kathy who acted in this play in Chicago and loved it, as a former English teacher, too, and urged me twenty years ago to read it. Thanks, Kathy. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes.
I learned that the play began as a kind of meditation on the real-life conflict between poet Stephen Spender and novelist David Leavitt.
I see at a glance that not everyone loves this play, but for reasons above I connected to it. And it really flows, great talk, raising so many questions.
February 5, 2023
One of the most compelling plays I’ve ever read, “Collected Stories” raises questions about the inherit theft in sharing stories and what we owe (& give) to the people we care about. Plus, its ending is so clever that I had to stare at the ceiling for a while after finishing it. Just brilliant.
November 28, 2011
I thought this play was fantastic in almost every way (especially in the pacing and the consistency and development of the characters) and would love to see it staged.
September 26, 2023
When my daughter signed up to do her school’s spring play, no one knew that only two people total would join the production. Are there actually plays for two actors? Why yes, apparently there are a bunch. The one selected was “Collected Stories” by Donald Margulies, and over the next two months her mother and I got to know the play very well as we did line reading after line reading after line reading after -
Ruth is an established writer and professor leading an increasingly hermetic existence; Lisa is a young creative writing graduate student with hopes and ambitions and fears. Over the course of two acts and six scenes, their relationship rises and falls while touching upon the darker issues of being a writer: what it means to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, what it means to be inspired, what it means to *take*.
I first read through “Collected Stories” after practicing Act I, Scene I with my daughter. This long scene presents two interesting and flawed characters with vast differences in age, experience, and needs. It’s funny; it’s intriguing; it hints at places for their relationship to go. After I read it I was hooked, and wanted to know what happened next. Successive scenes jump ahead by a couple of years each time, and what you end up with is a complete arc chronicling the rise and fall of a mentor/mentee relationship. And that end is *heavy* without being melodramatic, a confluence of intentions and phobia and regrets that collide into together with tragic results.
So I liked the play quite a bit when I first read it. And then I continued to practice it with my daughter, again and again and again and again and… And at some point I started feeling like there were some cracks in the play. Most notably, a lot of key information seems to come out in slightly ungainly monologues or semi-monologues. In addition, although there are some themes that are carried throughout the play, there were a few that felt like they appeared rather ungracefully.
I suspect I am being a bit nitpicky about “Collected Stories”; after all, my first impression was quite favorable, and only declined after multiple weeks of line reading practice. But, well, I guess my current opinion is all I have.
Ruth is an established writer and professor leading an increasingly hermetic existence; Lisa is a young creative writing graduate student with hopes and ambitions and fears. Over the course of two acts and six scenes, their relationship rises and falls while touching upon the darker issues of being a writer: what it means to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, what it means to be inspired, what it means to *take*.
I first read through “Collected Stories” after practicing Act I, Scene I with my daughter. This long scene presents two interesting and flawed characters with vast differences in age, experience, and needs. It’s funny; it’s intriguing; it hints at places for their relationship to go. After I read it I was hooked, and wanted to know what happened next. Successive scenes jump ahead by a couple of years each time, and what you end up with is a complete arc chronicling the rise and fall of a mentor/mentee relationship. And that end is *heavy* without being melodramatic, a confluence of intentions and phobia and regrets that collide into together with tragic results.
So I liked the play quite a bit when I first read it. And then I continued to practice it with my daughter, again and again and again and again and… And at some point I started feeling like there were some cracks in the play. Most notably, a lot of key information seems to come out in slightly ungainly monologues or semi-monologues. In addition, although there are some themes that are carried throughout the play, there were a few that felt like they appeared rather ungracefully.
I suspect I am being a bit nitpicky about “Collected Stories”; after all, my first impression was quite favorable, and only declined after multiple weeks of line reading practice. But, well, I guess my current opinion is all I have.
October 23, 2022
[This written when the play was first produced/published in 1997]:
The first scene of Donald Margulies's marvelous new play Collected Stories is built around an English professor's critique of a short story written by one of her students. This is hardly the stuff of great drama--although it makes for dazzling, literate dialogue--but this is a play where the conflicts don't come where you expect them to, where nothing is clearcut, and where ultimately the interplay between two colossal egos sparks a climax of riveting theatricality.
At first the story recalls All About Eve. Lisa Morrison, an earnest, awkward graduate student, comes to the apartment of Ruth Steiner, a successful writer of short stories and professor at NYU, for a tutorial session. Lisa gushes embarrassingly about how much she loves Ruth's work, and rather brashly turns the conversation to Ruth's need for a teaching assistant and how much she would love to have that job. For her part, Ruth stays shrewd and detached--no Margo Channing, she; and in fact she compares herself to Thelma Ritter, the streetwise character actress who played Margo's knowing secretary. What's interesting about this line is that we already know enough about Ruth to know that it's not true: Ruth is posing as someone and hopes that we don't notice: she's clearly no fool and certainly not taken in by Lisa's rather obvious genuflection, but she lets Lisa do it anyway. I, for one, was hooked: what is this woman doing?
As the play's five succeeding scenes unfold, we find out a great deal about Ruth, and also about Lisa. The Eve storyline progresses but then takes an interesting twist that echoes the recent Stephen Spender-David Leavitt controversy (which involved a young writer who wrote a book based on personal incidents in the life of a famous older one). The second act is rich with incident and nuance, as Ruth and the now more mature Lisa play out and then review the nature of their complex relationship. Are they friends? colleagues? mentor and protegee? mother and daughter? Or do they remain teacher and student, the latter having been taught too well?
The first scene of Donald Margulies's marvelous new play Collected Stories is built around an English professor's critique of a short story written by one of her students. This is hardly the stuff of great drama--although it makes for dazzling, literate dialogue--but this is a play where the conflicts don't come where you expect them to, where nothing is clearcut, and where ultimately the interplay between two colossal egos sparks a climax of riveting theatricality.
At first the story recalls All About Eve. Lisa Morrison, an earnest, awkward graduate student, comes to the apartment of Ruth Steiner, a successful writer of short stories and professor at NYU, for a tutorial session. Lisa gushes embarrassingly about how much she loves Ruth's work, and rather brashly turns the conversation to Ruth's need for a teaching assistant and how much she would love to have that job. For her part, Ruth stays shrewd and detached--no Margo Channing, she; and in fact she compares herself to Thelma Ritter, the streetwise character actress who played Margo's knowing secretary. What's interesting about this line is that we already know enough about Ruth to know that it's not true: Ruth is posing as someone and hopes that we don't notice: she's clearly no fool and certainly not taken in by Lisa's rather obvious genuflection, but she lets Lisa do it anyway. I, for one, was hooked: what is this woman doing?
As the play's five succeeding scenes unfold, we find out a great deal about Ruth, and also about Lisa. The Eve storyline progresses but then takes an interesting twist that echoes the recent Stephen Spender-David Leavitt controversy (which involved a young writer who wrote a book based on personal incidents in the life of a famous older one). The second act is rich with incident and nuance, as Ruth and the now more mature Lisa play out and then review the nature of their complex relationship. Are they friends? colleagues? mentor and protegee? mother and daughter? Or do they remain teacher and student, the latter having been taught too well?
January 16, 2018
Similar to Sight Unseen, Collected Stories is a story about artists and the creation of art, this time focusing on writers rather than artists. Collected Stories is about a well-regarded writer and her mentor, a young, upper-class woman. Debra Messing played the younger woman in the Broadway premiere, and it’s easy to see why: she has the perfect energy and personality for the role.
I enjoyed the play, but the ending dragged. It was almost as if someone noticed the play was too short a week before the premiere and so a bunch of extraneous stuff was added to hit the necessary run time. Honestly, an additional scene earlier in the play and a tighter final scene would have been to the play’s benefit. As is, there’s not quite enough tension in the overall arc, despite some good individual scenes. Recommended.
I enjoyed the play, but the ending dragged. It was almost as if someone noticed the play was too short a week before the premiere and so a bunch of extraneous stuff was added to hit the necessary run time. Honestly, an additional scene earlier in the play and a tighter final scene would have been to the play’s benefit. As is, there’s not quite enough tension in the overall arc, despite some good individual scenes. Recommended.
January 11, 2025
I first read this play back in 2000 when I was cast in a staged reading of it, as Lisa. Now I'm more or less old enough to play Ruth, and I hope to. This play is especially resonant for me, as I am a writer, and one who has often pulled extensively from "real life," which has sometimes led to people being hurt or angry when they recognized themselves or events they experienced/processed differently than I did, or differently than I chose to frame it in a piece of writing. This play is even more relevant now, as the questions of who has the right to tell certain stories, how to weigh an artist's art vs. their life, and how to define truth have become increasingly crucial and fraught since it was written.
March 10, 2020
"Gossip's gotten a bum rap. It's a neglected art form. Our new literature. It's got everything: mythology, spectacle, Oedipal drama, morality play..." (33)
"Movie stars misbehave all the time. Always have. That's what they do. That's why we invented them: So they could act out for all of us. It's not the misbehavior. It's what it represents." (34)
"Once upon a time writers made things up, you know. Can you imagine?" (75)
"Movie stars misbehave all the time. Always have. That's what they do. That's why we invented them: So they could act out for all of us. It's not the misbehavior. It's what it represents." (34)
"Once upon a time writers made things up, you know. Can you imagine?" (75)
January 10, 2018
Collected Stories features just two characters talking to each other—nothing more—and it couldn’t be more dynamic and compelling, even on the page. Margulies is working with thematically rich material, and he is beautifully even-handed in developing the conflict at the center of the play, with eloquent, revealing, yet organic dialogue.
April 16, 2021
All writers will appreciate the story that unfolds in this play. The dialogue and the characters are so authentic and well developed. This play develops the question, who gets to tell a story? Who owns a story? It is so well crafted in its exploration of this question. I highly recommend this to anyone who writes, regardless of whether they write plays, fiction, nonfiction or poetry.
December 19, 2021
Two women writers, one young and inexperienced, one older who doesn’t know she’s Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” until the end. It’s talky, but it doesn’t, at first go round, scream reading. And there is a lot of screaming. Lent to me from Don’s personal library.
May 3, 2023
I’ve been reading some plays lately to study great dialogue and this one was wonderful. I’d love to see it performed. As someone with an MFA in creative writing , I loved the relationship here between writing teacher and student, the way admiration can transform into envy.
March 22, 2018
3 3/4 stars
August 1, 2018
2 w - great conflict
December 31, 2018
Such a thoughtful, well-constructed play with two well-developed characters. Great read!! I kept hearing Linda Lavin’s voice, Tony-nominated in its revival.
June 7, 2019
4/5⭐️
Very interesting play
Very interesting play
March 27, 2022
Donald Margulies continues to be one of my favorite playwrights. I was lucky to perform as Anna in A Coutry House, and I'd love to play Ruth in this play...one can dream...
September 20, 2022
Fantastic examination and dissection of the mentor/mentee relationship. Wonderful, almost effortless character development.
July 30, 2023
His most ferocious and textured play I’ve read by DM, with real substance in the ethics and characters. Nice time structure and sense of time passing as well.
September 7, 2024
anyone else pick up on the homoerotic nature of ruth and lisa's relationship or is it just me?
July 8, 2025
Wow. let me play Lisa one day 🫶
July 6, 2017
When I first read this play and was cast in it, I was a 22-year-old, wide-eyed, first-year PhD student. I have always wondered, since then, how I would look back at that endearing age, when I was so innocent, so confused, and so lost. After this many years, I can say with certainty that I have never missed her. I am glad I am no more 22.
A profound and lovely play about the intricacies of human relationship.
A profound and lovely play about the intricacies of human relationship.
November 17, 2013
I'd really like to see this performed (though it turns out that I would have a hard time playing either part in this work). I didn't realize this was a two-person performance. What struck me most is that it was a window (I assume accurate) into a relationship that I'm not likely to have: one between two women as one is descending from the strongest part of her intellectual life and the other works her way up to it. I found the characters to feel very real (with a pretty intimate view of their relationship). Their interactions are well chosen to present a concise telling of their relationship over a span of years. There is a realistic mix of emotional and intellectual responses in their interactions.
December 8, 2015
As an aspiring writer I was initially very drawn to the story and very much enjoyed watching Lisa travel the path I one day wish to take. Although I do have to agree with some of the previous comments on pacing, my drama class relieved this a little during our class read by deciding at certain points Ruth really needed a Scottish or Scouse accent.
Overall it was really exciting to watch both the characters develop and see their relationship unfold.
Overall it was really exciting to watch both the characters develop and see their relationship unfold.
April 29, 2007
I love this play. I would have been perfect for the role of the young writer, had I not been in Buenos Aires during the firs 3 weeks of rehearsal. Sigh! This play has only 2 very complex characters who care for each other deeply, but who fight and compete with each other, trying to prove their worth to themselves, to each other, and to the world. Fabulous.
March 31, 2010
I'm becoming much more fond of plays and this is an excellent one. The character development is believable and interesting. I could see this play being performed even when I was just reading it to myself. It is a short read and very worthwhile.
September 1, 2016
Saw this play on Broadway several years ago with Linda Lavin and loved it. It reads incredibly well too. Explores important questions about the ownership of stories, using (stealing?) other people's stories, and weighing the human cost of ambition and making art. A terrific, complex play.
July 30, 2014
I LOVED this play! I was assigned a monologue from it for my acting class and I found myself absorbed by it. Some parts really hit home, others were so-so, but overall I really enjoyed it and the strong characters of Ruth and Lisa!
May 23, 2009
Again, another commission by South Coast Repertory. It originally opened in 1996 and again on 05/22/09 to a five minute standing ovation. A definate read and must see
September 1, 2011
overall good. Staging challenge: keeping it dynamic with only 2 actresses onstage at a time.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews