Artist Profile
Richard Greenberg is an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He has had more than 25 plays premiere on and Off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last.
Greenberg is perhaps best known for his 2003 Tony Award-winning play, Take Me Out, about the conflicts that arise after a Major League Baseball player nonchalantly announces to the media that he is gay. The play premiered in London and ran in New York as the first collaboration between England’s Donmar Warehouse and New York’s Public Theater. After it transferred to Broadway in early 2003, Take Me Out won widespread critical acclaim for Greenberg and many prestigious awards.
Along with Take Me Out, Greenberg’s plays include The Dazzle, The American Plan, Life Under Water, and The Author’s Voice. His adaptation of August Strindberg’s Dance of Death ran on Broadway in 2002, starring Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, and David Strathairn.
He received the George Oppenheimer Award in 1985 for The Bloodletters, produced off-off-Broadway while he was at Yale. In 1998 he was the first winner of the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a playwright in mid-career. In 2013, Greenberg worked on three shows: on Broadway, an adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Assembled Parties, and the book for the musical Far From Heaven, which opened in June 2013 at Playwrights Horizons. His play Our Mother’s Brief Affair premiered at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa in April 2009. The play opened on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. His play The Babylon Line premiered Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.