PULITZER PRIZE WINNER-DRAMA

	April 13 , 2000
	Another in our conversations with winners of this year's Pulitzer prizes in the arts, and once again to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The Pulitzer for drama this year went to Donald Margulies for his play "Dinner with Friends." It's a rueful comedy about love, commitment, and friendship in the age of divorce. The play is currently running at the Variety Arts theater in New York. Here's an excerpt with the original cast. Beth has just told her best friends that her husband, Tom, is leaving her. BETH: He confessed because we had an argument about the dog. (Sobbing) He hates the dog, and the dog chews on the rug, and it's all my fault. He said he was miserable, that he's always been miserable... FRIEND: What? BETH: ...That he's been miserable for so long, he doesn't know what it's like to be happy. FRIEND: Tom said that? BETH: Then he said this wasn't the life he had in mind for himself, and if he were to stay married to me it would kill him. He would die young. (Laughter) Did you know about this? Did he say anything to you? FRIEND: No, this is totally... I didn't have a clue. FRIEND TWO: We all just went out to eat together. BETH: I know. FRIEND TWO: Right before we left, that Indian place in Branford. We love their chicken tikka masala. (Laughter) BETH: It's not about John. FRIEND TWO: I mean, he seemed fine. You both didn't seem miserable at all. BETH: I know! FRIEND TWO: Wait, you mean to tell me we were sitting there having a wonderful time and he was not only miserable, but in love with someone else? BETH: I know. Isn't that... FRIEND TWO: Oh, God, sweetie! I am so sorry. This can't be happening. How could he do this to you? Oh. Feel free to jump in anytime. FRIEND: What? (Laughter) I'm listening. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Playwright Donald Margulies joins us now. He also wrote the Obie award- winning plays, "Sight Unseen" and "The Model Apartment." He's in Seattle this week for the world premiere of his adaptation of Sholom Asch's 1906 play, "God of Vengeance." Thank you for being with us and congratulations. DONALD MARGULIES: Thank you very much. I'm glad to talk to you. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Tell us more about the play. What happens next? DONALD MARGULIES: Oh, dear. Well, the play really takes the phenomenon of divorce and skews it somewhat. The play essentially is about two couples who are longtime friends, both in their 40's and essentially dissects the various permutations of what happens when a breakup unsettles the equilibrium of four long-term friends. So it's really... It really analyzes the effects on the foursome more than it does on any individual. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And it really seems to... the divorce seems to upset the other couple almost more than it does the people going through the divorce. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right. You know, I think it's really about the aftershocks that we all experience when certain constants in our lives, things that we perceive to be constant, suddenly shatter and are no longer dependable. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It's very funny. It's not preachy at all, not judgmental. DONALD MARGULIES: I hope not. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: No, not at all. But am I wrong to say that there is an affirmation of long-term marriage in it? DONALD MARGULIES: Well, I think it's a hopeful play. I don't think that it's by any means is a sentimental or a simplistic view of marriage. I think that what I strive to do in any of my plays is to look at a problem, look at a phenomenon from all different angles, and through objectivity, try to show that dilemma in all various colorations. So there aren't simple solutions to any of the issues that arise in the play, as there are not in life. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did this play reflect concerns that you were having at the time that you wrote it? I mean, you've been in a fairly long-term marriage. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right. My wife and I have been together for 21 years. We have seen this phenomenon take place repeatedly in our circle of friends, and I think that sometimes we feel as if we're clutching one another through the maelstrom. And I think with so many of my plays, they tend to reflect things that trouble me, or interest me, or confound me in some way at the time in which I create the play, and I think this play definitely falls along those lines. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Are you surprised at the reception it's gotten? It's been very popular here in the United States, and I understand it's quite a hit in Paris, too. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right, which turned out to be complete luck. I never would have thought that the French would have embraced it to the extent that they have, but they have. I think it's the most successful American play in Paris in quite some time. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, how do you explain it-- the success there and here? DONALD MARGULIES: Well, you know, unwittingly, I think that the play taps into the zeitgeist in a way that I certainly couldn't have predicted and I'm grateful that I couldn't have predicted it, because I think had I written it with a certain result in mind, it may not have had the favorable result that it has had. But I do think that, you know, I'm 45, I've been in a long-term relationship. I think that so many of my contemporaries are taking stock, and I think that the play somehow speaks to that. It gives voice to certain issues that people are living with or grappling with, sometimes, that have not been articulated, and it gives voice to these issues. Watching the audience's reaction to the play has been very gratifying and interesting. It touches people, it upsets people, it discomforts people. I mean, obviously there's humor in it as well, but I think that it also touches a nerve, and I think that's one of the reasons why it has had the success that it has had. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I wanted to ask you about that. It's very funny, and yet it is touching and sad in some places. How do you-- I'm not sure this is explicable-- but how do you put together those two things, something so serious and yet make it so funny? DONALD MARGULIES: You know, I don't really know. All I know is that in writing truthfully, there is humor, even in a terribly sad or nearly tragic situation. And I think that as long as I am faithful to the situation and faithful to the voices of the characters, and if these are people who possess intellect and wit and a certain ironic viewpoint, humor will find its way through almost any situation. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: When did you know that you wanted to be a playwright? DONALD MARGULIES: Oh, gosh, you know, I think from the first time I was taken to the theater at the age of nine. I think the first play that I ever saw, not the first musical, but the first play was Herb Gardner's play, "1,000 Clowns," and I must have been about nine or ten when my parents took me and my brother to see it on Broadway with Jason Robards, and Barry Gordon was the kid I so identified with. And I think that the excitement of sitting in a theater with... and the communal experience of sitting in a theater had a tremendous impact on me. It took me years to return to playwrighting as something to pursue, but because I was a visual art student most of my young life and most of my life as a student, writing became a kind of guilty pleasure for me. And then it wasn't until I was a college student at Suny-Purchase where I was studying visual art that I began to seriously write plays. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Do you think, though... You did go to a lot of plays as a child, didn't you? Do you think that made a big difference? DONALD MARGULIES: I do. You know what? I wonder if generations today are exposing their children to theater in the same way that I was exposed to theater. But I grew up in a middle class, Jewish background in Brooklyn where we weren't religious people. For us, the religion was show business. We went to Broadway. We didn't go to synagogue, but we went to see "Hello, Dolly." So it was something that was instilled in me from a very early time, the power of the theater, that I think is possibly a dying form of entertainment. I don't know that young people are being exposed to it quite in the way that my generation was. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And you're a very hardworking playwright. You write for the screen. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You've written quite a lot of screenplays, as I understand it, and you're doing an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book, "A Man in Full," for an NBC mini-series. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right. That's right. I'm in the midst of that right now. During all of this Pulitzer mayhem, I'm also carving out the second half of a two-part mini- series, based on "A Man in Full," which is a considerable challenge. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And there's screenplay writing both for television and for the film. DONALD MARGULIES: That's right. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is that very, very different from writing for stage? DONALD MARGULIES: Well, it's very different because in theater my voice is still the purest that it can be as a writer. I think that film and television has become such a corporate endeavor, that it doesn't really allow the purity of the artist's voice to come through. I think that's why I continually return to the theater where it really is a writer's medium completely. The experience that I'm having right now with the premiere of my newest play, which is an adaptation of a 94-year-old play by Sholom Asch called "God of Vengeance," has been a wonderful, joyful experience in the theater for me in terms of my professional life. It's been extremely gratifying working on the largest canvas I've ever worked in as a playwright. There are 22 characters in this play, which is a complete departure from the chamber-like pieces that I've been writing in recent years. So it's been feeling like a wonderful expansion, so I'm enjoying it quite a bit. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What does the prize, the Pulitzer Prize, mean to you at this stage in your career? As I understand it, you were nominated twice before? DONALD MARGULIES: I was a finalist twice before, yeah. You know, I don't think that I ever truly aspired to winning a Pulitzer Prize, but when I was a finalist in 1992, I think it was, for my play "Sight Unseen," it suddenly became something that was accessible to me in ways that I never really gave it much thought about before. I think that at this stage in my career, at a point at which I've been working fairly prolifically in the theater to growing reputation-- I have a large body of work, I don't know exactly how many, but at least a dozen plays that have been produced on stages all across the country-- I think that this kind of national recognition happening at this particular time feels very sweet to me. It seems to acknowledge not only - "dinner with friends," but the body of work that you see today, and a sense of validation for all of those years of work. So I'm very delighted with it, I truly am. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Donald Margulies, thank you so much for being with us, and congratulations again. DONALD MARGULIES: Thank you very much.

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