by The American playwright Richard Greenberg, who died of cancer at the age of 67, was an accomplished and productive chronicler of the life of young, aspiring mobile specialists in the 1980s – he himself wanted to become an architect for the first time. He caught the American new dramwriting from the era of Sam Shepard and David Mamet. He had no certain axes to grind and wrote beautifully.
Every time they saw a piece of him -he was once referred to as the “American Noël Fezling” -they understood why his household gods Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton were. He was serious, educated, committed and enlightened.
In his breakthrough game Eastern Standard (1988) he anatomized a Yuppie quartet of the best friends and siblings who sorted out their relationships when they moved from Manhattan to a summer house on Long Island. And he did this in a moved atmosphere of guilt transactions that the critics got some collective goats.
I saw the Eastern standard in the same Broadway season as Ar Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour and Wendy Wassersstein The Heidi Chronicles. All three pieces returned to the classic structure and narrative in bourgeois environments, which turn their backs on the village of Greenwich, the political protest and the shabby social behavior.
He told the New York Times in 1988: “The idea that the moral and personal life of the middle class is not an issue that is worthy of fascism for me, a censorship that says that we know everything there is.” And it is certainly true that he was under the surface of the life of his characters with unusual skills and revealed complex layers.
Many of the pieces of Greenberg (and there were over 30) were discontinued in Manhattan and the socio -economic satellites of the Hamptons and Catskills. But his personal style and personal behavior were mysterious, withdrawn and uncooperative. As he admitted in a daily telegraph interview in 2009:
Nevertheless, in 2003 he won the Tony Best Play Award for Take Me Out – World in London in Donmar Warehouse – a piece about a baseball player from the Major League as a gay, who spoke funny about bigotry and homophobia in sports. Here, too, he did not make books; He was graceful through the arguments.
The Donmar also – in 1999 – had presented the clever and absorbing three days by Rain (1997) and divided the meat -like appetite and passion in two overlapping triangular love stories with a great line -up of Colin Firth, Elizabeth McGovern and David Morrissey. The play was triumphantly revived in 2006 on Broadway with a trio by Paul Rudd, Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper.
Greenberg was born in Green Meadow, Long Island, New York, Shirley’s son (born Levine) and Leon Greenberg, a manager for a chain of cinemas. In 1980 he completed Princeton with a degree in English and wrote down for the Playwriting course in the literature on Harvard’s doctoral program for literature. There he wrote The Bloodletters (1984) about a Jewish teenager in Long Island, who develops a rare illness that makes him smell of a dirty bathroom. The critic of the New York Times, Frank Rich, a remarkable champion of him, said that the play “had designed so well that one has to admire the anti -promising author, even if he is too hard”.
He signed a contract with the South Coast Repertoire in California, where some of his pieces were first presented. Other important mandatory houses in the early days were the representative of Seattle and the Manhattan Theater Club, both Springboarding Eastern Standard to Broadway.
Greenberg used the James’ Washington Square (in his theater format of the heiress) and wrote The American Plan (1990) as a sharp, melancholic mother and daughter drama of the great psychological and narrative imagination. In the 1960s in the Catskills it was celebrated by Michael Billington as an “absolute cracker” when it received its British premiere in the Theater Royal in 2013, Bath, directed by David Grindley and above average equipped by Diana, who quickly as a young European Refuge and Emily-Tafe as a young Ehesiss-Heires-Heires-Heires-Einress, a daughter in which the noble heath was played.
The last piece of his ego, which I was unusual, was The Dazzle (2002), which was presented in 2015 by Simon Evans Michael Grandage Company in a pop-up theater in the former Central Saint Martins School on Charing Cross Road. The piece is based on a true story of two brothers or at least their decomposing corpse, which was found in their house in the family in New York in 1947. A team of people in weeks had needed it to clarify their after -school care – books, instruments, newspapers.
And from this posthumous point of view of the brothers, Greenberg looked back. He fictionalized what her life could have been, inspired by the possibilities of how the two men could have come in such a sad state. Andrew Scott played brilliantly the eccentric pianist Langley, David Dawson, just as great, his accountant brother Homer.
The piece was in a small room with a Grand Piano – relatively checked – but when the story developed, the room began to lend itself to crap. A Bohemian host, played by a beautifully placed Joanna Vanderham, entered her world and almost married Langley and then married much later before the brothers were left alone, hidden, dirty and dying, surrounded by her accumulated souvenirs and detritus.
The wildness of these biographies revealed the strand of jaundice melancholy and dissatisfaction, which through the majority of Greenberg’s life of Greenberg, the disadvantage of their wealth and privileges. It is impossible not to conclude that there was something of it about Greenberg himself, the fuel for his letter.
He is survived by his brother Edward.
• Richard Greenberg, playwright, born on February 22, 1958, died on July 4, 2025
