Donald Margulies

An outstanding artist as a child, playwright Donald Margulies won a partial scholarship to the prestigious Pratt Institute in his native Brooklyn and then transferred to SUNY Purchase. There, under the wing of critic and professor Julius Novick, he decided he would be a playwright, and though the road was long and hard (he spent several years toiling as a graphics designer), he finally made an impression when "Sight Unseen" (1991), his meditation on art, fame, money and lost love, earned an OBIE and became a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. It marked his first association with South Coast Rep, the Costa Mesa, California theater that also commissioned the subsequent two-character "Collected Stories" (1996), its tale of rivalry between an established writer and an up-and-coming one recalling "All About Eve" and garnering Pulitzer consideration as well. His only foray to Broadway (to date) has been "What's Wrong with This Picture?" (1994), a cliched, autobiographical look at 1950s Brooklyn originally produced 10 years before at the Manhattan Theatre Company. He faired better with "The Model Apartment" (1996), a play confronting the Holocaust, which garnered him a second OBIE.