
Tony-winning playwright Richard Greenberg, 67, has died, it was announced on July 6. He won that Tony for 2003’s Take Me Out, about a gay baseball player (that show won numerous other awards as well). Greenberg’s other Broadway shows included Eastern Standard, Dance of Death, The Violet Hour, A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, Three Days of Rain, The American Plan, Our Mother’s Brief Affair, and the flop 2013 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (that just never works as a show). His plays often lampooned—in a literary way—the upper-middle class East-Coasters he grew up with. Greenberg told Adam Langer of the Forward, “I like to listen. I don’t have that much of a history myself. I read books, I went to school, I worked in the theater — but then there were people who actually did things, and I was fascinated by what they had to say. I’m also fascinated by happy families.” He added that “I like the past because it’s hard to grasp the present. The past you can reflect on — obviously, it’s changing all the time too, but at a different rate and in a different way. I don’t set them in the past because of a longing to live there, but I’m interested in it.”
