Richard Greenberg, whose plays probed love and baseball, dies at 67

Boston Globe

08-07-2025

'Among his peers,' New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2003, 'only Tony Kushner matches Mr. Greenberg in linguistic richness and playfulness.' Profiling Mr. Greenberg in 2020, The New York Times style magazine called him 'the Bard of American Privilege.'
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Mr. Greenberg's characters were snobbish but self-aware, with a tendency to speak in pithy one-liners and epigrams. In his breakout hit 'Eastern Standard,' which opened on Broadway in 1989, two siblings discuss their mother, who is said to be so conservative that 'there's not a revolution in history that would have failed to execute her.'
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Another of his Broadway plays - 2013's 'The Assembled Parties,' which brought him his second Tony nomination for best play - was set at a family's lavish Upper West Side apartment, taking place across two Christmas celebrations 20 years apart.
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Although he often returned to elegant and urbane settings, Mr. Greenberg ranged widely, taking inspiration from historical figures while telling stories about self-invention, obsession, or deceit.
In 'Night and Her Stars' (1994), he dramatized the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, using real-life celebrity Charles Van Doren as a central figure. 'The Dazzle' (2002) was inspired by New York City's most famous hoarders, the Collyer brothers, who were found dead in their overstuffed home in 1947. 'The Violet Hour' (2002) centered on an upstart book editor modeled after Maxwell Perkins, who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
'We're always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,' Mr. Greenberg told a Princeton University interviewer in 2013, 'and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they're wrong.'
Two of his plays, 'Three Days of Rain' and 'Take Me Out,' were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The first, a study of familial disconnection, featured a trio of actors playing parents as well as their children. It ran off-Broadway in 1997 and became what Mr. Greenberg described as 'my cash calf,' appearing in theaters around the country and coming to Broadway in 2006, with a cast featuring Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper.
In 'Take Me Out,' Mr. Greenberg explored racism and homophobia more than a decade before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide. The play imagined what would happen if an active major leaguer publicly announced that he was gay - a moment that Mr. Greenberg, a gay man who steadfastly rooted for the New York Yankees, was still waiting for when he died.
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After premiering in London in 2002, 'Take Me Out' transferred to the Public Theater in New York and moved to Broadway in 2003, running for 355 performances. Its cast was led by Daniel Sunjata as Darren Lemming, a beloved and biracial center fielder for the fictional New York Empires, and Denis O'Hare as Mason Marzac, Darren's new accountant, who is also gay.
The play won Tony Awards for Mr. Greenberg, O'Hare, and director Joe Mantello. A much-lauded 2022 revival also won Tonys, including for actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who delivered one of Mr. Greenberg's most acclaimed monologues while playing the role of Marzac, who comes to love baseball while working with his new client.
'Baseball is better than democracy - or at least than democracy as it's practiced in this country - because unlike democracy, baseball acknowledges loss,' he says. 'While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose. Not only says it - insists upon it!'
'Democracy is lovely,' he adds, 'but baseball's more mature.'
The younger of two sons, Richard Greenberg was born in the Long Island suburb of East Meadow, N.Y., on Feb. 22, 1958. His father was a movie theater executive, and his mother was a homemaker.
In high school, Mr. Greenberg played viola and acted in plays, winning a local theater prize for his performance in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'No Exit.' He majored in English at Princeton, where he wrote his senior thesis - a 438-page novel titled 'A Romantic Career' - under Joyce Carol Oates. She gave it an A.
After graduating in 1980, he enrolled in an English PhD program at Harvard. He soon grew bored and, on the side, wrote a play that won him admission to Yale's playwriting program. By the time he received his MFA in 1985, one of his plays, 'The Bloodletters,' had been staged off-off-Broadway.
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Mr. Greenberg gained a wider following with 'Eastern Standard,' which premiered in Seattle in 1988 and soon moved to Broadway. The show followed a quartet of young New York City strivers whose lives are upended when one of the group is diagnosed with AIDS. By Act Two, the friends have decamped to a summer house in the Hamptons and, partly out of guilt, invited a homeless woman to join them.
The play found a high-profile champion in Times critic Frank Rich, who said it 'captures the romantic sophistication of the most sublime comedies ever made in this country.' Yet it also came in for criticism from detractors who argued that Mr. Greenberg, in writing a screwball comedy, failed to address AIDS with the seriousness it deserved.
'That was both the best-and worst-reviewed play of the season,' Mr. Greenberg told the Sunday Times of London in 2002, 'and, at the time, I had no idea who I was; I only knew myself by the way I'd been reviewed.'
In the aftermath, Mr. Greenberg faded from public view, sticking mainly to his Chelsea apartment and a nearby diner he used as an office. In part, he told The New York Times, he avoided the spotlight because he wanted to focus on work. He had successfully battled Hodgkin's lymphoma in his 30s, and the illness left him with a newfound sense of his mortality.
In addition to working on original plays, Mr. Greenberg adapted August Strindberg's 'Dance of Death' for a 2001 Broadway production starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren.
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He also wrote the book for the Tony-nominated 2008 revival of 'Pal Joey,' a Rodgers and Hart musical, featuring actors Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton, and Matthew Risch; adapted Truman Capote's novella 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' for a short-lived Broadway play starring Emilia Clarke in 2013; and wrote the book for a musical adaptation of 'Far From Heaven,' filmmaker Todd Haynes's homage to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, which ran off-Broadway the same year.
Before his death, Mr. Greenberg was working with director Robert Falls on a contemporary adaptation of Barry's play 'Holiday,' the basis of an acclaimed 1938 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The play is slated to premiere in January at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.
'His plays held a mirror up - not just to society but to the strange inner workings of the human heart,' Falls wrote in a tribute on Bluesky. 'He wrote about baseball and betrayal, family and fame, loneliness and grace - always with elegance, irony, and a touch of something ineffable.'