Donald Margulies may have a Pulitzer Prize
under his belt, a teaching job at Yale University, a family and
a home in Connecticut, but the 50-year-old Jewish playwright
insists he will always be a Brooklyn boy at heart.
"I firmly believe that our childhoods are inescapable,"
the Sheepshead Bay native and Brooklyn public school graduate
told GO Brooklyn. "Wherever we’re from, it’s something that
lives with us always, no matter how far we go from that birthplace.
The older I get, the more that I believe that is true. It’s undeniable.
It presents itself in all kinds of ways in our everyday lives.
You just feel little bursts of the past and that is something
that has always interested me as a writer – how the past and
the present are very often concurrent.
"There’s always a doppelganger, a child version of me, commenting
on the action of my life," he added. "I don’t think
that it’s something that ever goes away."
Best-known for his acclaimed stage dramas "Dinner with Friends"
and "Sight Unseen," Margulies says his latest work,
aptly titled "Brooklyn Boy," is one of his most personal
to date, emphasizing that like all of his plays, it draws loosely
on experiences he has had or people has met, but warning that
its protagonist should not be seen as a portrait of himself as
an artist.
"I think an analytical point of view is probably the best
way to [describe how my plays are written]," explains Margulies.
"I think any writer who writes autobiographically is not
truly writing down everything that happens to him or her. What
a writer does, is take life experience and turn it into something
else. Although my protagonists in certain works may be contemporaries
of mine and I would have known them if they actually existed,
they are not representative of me."
Directed by Daniel Sullivan and starring Adam Arkin, Polly Draper,
Ari Graynor, Arye Gross, Kevin Isola, Mimi Lieber and Allan Miller,
"Brooklyn Boy" is about a writer (Arkin) who finally
hits the big time after years of struggling, then finds himself
pondering how success changes people and how where they grew
up affects who they become.
"’Brooklyn Boy’ seems – to those who have seen it and have
talked to me about it – like part of a natural progression of
my work," says Margulies. "It seems to encapsulate
so many themes that have interested me throughout my body of
work and it seems that those themes just never go away. I think
that’s probably true of any writer whose work you look at over
a period of time. You see recurring themes.
"In ’Brooklyn Boy,’ I deal with issues of the artist in
society and public versus private identity, whether it is religious
or cultural or creative identity, and I think all of these themes
converge in this play, but I’m looking at it from a distinctly
middle-age vantage point, which is something I could never have
done before."
The themes in Margulies latest work seem to be resonating with
a larger audience than Brooklynites alone.
"It’s been very interesting and gratifying to see this play
succeed in front of Orange County, Calif., audiences," says
the man who moved to Coney Island as a boy, then went on to graduate
from SUNY Purchase. "It’s a hit in Paris right now. In French.
And it’s called ’Brooklyn Boy!’ It’s just delightful. My wife
and I went to the premiere in Paris and it was just exhilarating
to see the French laugh at all the same places where Orange County
was laughing and yet it is such a specifically New York story,
in a sense. But I think the truer you can be, the more universal
the work tends to be."
Despite his enormous success in theater both here and abroad,
Margulies confesses he still has dreams to realize. For one,
he would love to direct original scripts he has penned, not simply
write teleplays based on his theatrical works like he did for
the HBO adaptation of "Dinner with Friends" or scripts
for episodes of TV shows such as the beloved, but now-defunct
series, "Once and Again."
"I’ve been writing screenplays for a long time and I guess
I’m well-regarded as a screenwriter-for-hire, but my success
rate of actually getting [my scripts] made has been rather poor
and the things that have been made, have been made somewhat disappointingly,
from my point of view," he confides. "I would just
like to have that kind of control in [film] that I’ve enjoyed
for so long in theater, where truly the writer’s voice can be
at its purest and where the collaboration is about serving the
writer’s vision and the writer’s words."
For now, says Margulies, he is enjoying his accolades and the
flexibility his career offers him when it comes to spending time
with his physician wife, Lynn Street, and their 12-year-old son,
Miles.
"I guess I’m a happy man. That doesn’t make for such good
copy," he says with a laugh, adding that success and happiness
don’t necessarily inspire dramatic stories riddled with conflict
either. "That’s maybe one of the downsides. It’s difficult
to be gloomy and introspective. Being happy and successful is
not a great place to be writing from."
The Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of "Brooklyn Boy"
is now in preview performances at The Biltmore Theatre [261 West
47th St. Manhattan]. "Brooklyn Boy" officially opens
on Feb. 3. For more information, visit www.manhattantheatreclub.com
or call (212) 239-6200
