When we were first sent the email about Donald Margulies visiting campus, I was already preparing myself for a Jon Hamm-style cancellation e-mail. I’ve been hurt too many times. But alas, no cancellations occurred and a few days later I sat three rows back in the Gund Community Theatre to listen to one of my favorite playwrights talk about his life and his career.
Clearly, Donald Margulies is not quite at the Jon Hamm-level of celebrity, but I was way more excited for Marguiles than Mr. Hamm. (Sorry, moms.) Donald Margulies is an American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his play Dinner with Friends. Other notable plays of Marguiles include Sight Unseen, Collected Stories, and Time Stands Still. He’s also the screenwriter of the film The End of the Tour, adapted from David Lipsky’s memoir detailing the time he took a road trip from the man we all know as the “This is Water” guy, David Foster Wallace.
I discovered Margulies my junior year of high school when my long-time duet acting partner, Alli Halliday, and I needed a scene for the Central Arizona Acting Festival. We ended up settling on a scene from Time Stands Still when the female protagonist Sarah has a conversation with her friend’s much younger girlfriend, Mandy, about how Sarah injured her leg while working as a photojournalist in Iraq. I played Sarah and although we got a perfect score on the scene, we were disqualified because we ran six seconds over the time limit.
But what became important to me was the play. I don’t love acting. By my junior year of high school, I had pretty much realized that I liked directing and writing more than acting, but even now, Sarah speaks to me as an actress in a way that few characters do. And furthermore, the play itself is beautiful. Like many of Margulies’ plays, it focuses on human relationships; specifically, Time Stands Still reflects on the inner workings of romantic partnerships, seeking conventionality and the nature of guilt. I totally recommend it to anyone, regardless of your interest in theatre. I would lend you my copy, but oh my God Donald Margulies signed it and it’s my child and no one is touching it.
Walking into Donald Margulies talk, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. It’s always a risk meeting someone you only know through their plays or books because someone’s writing can create immeasurable expectations for when they actually open their mouths to speak.
Margulies, however, did not disappoint. He was funny and insightful and yes, a little bit pretentious, but that’s really just kind of how theatre-makers are. His stories pointed to how he became a playwright, the importance of mentors, of collaboration and of alone time without blatantly screaming “THIS IS HOW YOU BECOME A PLAYWRIGHT, KIDS.” He talked about his successes, but also his failures. I especially appreciated the tale of his “Broadway debacle,” which was how his Broadway debut was not the magical fairytale he envisioned. Instead, he was stuck with a director who heavily placed his one interpretation on the play. He joked about how that director has now made a lot of money on Broadway and I knew exactly who he was talking about because there are about 3 directors that one could describe that way, and one is a woman and another directs musicals.
Yes, there were points in Margulies talk which I didn’t agree with. Someone asked why he thought there weren’t many female playwrights on Broadway and he responded “I don’t know” and I sat there like “well, sexism, perhaps” but didn’t self-aggrandize or act like his route to success in theatre-making was the best one.
It meant a lot that he stuck around to talk to us after the formal session. It would have been easy to just jet while we stood around buying his plays. He was kind when I asked him to sign my copy of Time Stands Still and laughed when I told him I guessed who the aggravating director was. (He was a little baffled that I guessed, but my theatre deduction skills are strong.)
Unfortunately, I had rehearsal the next night and could not attend the screening of The End of the Tour and his talk about that process, but it is invaluable that Kenyon brought him to campus to talk to all the aspiring theatre-makers and writers on this campus. It was also nice to know that I am not the only one who totally geeks about playwrights who are still living. (Thanks, Kenyon, for your literary dorkiness.) I used to want to be a playwright and who knows, as someone who changes their career path twice a month, I might still pursue that. It definitely sparked the writing urge in me again after listening to Marguiles speak.
And, after looking through some Margulies interviews and quotes on the Internet post-talk, I found one from him that really speaks to my experience both of hearing him talk and of reading his plays:
“I like to flip through play scripts, not just my own; there is something exciting about seeing printed language on a page that triggers responses in me.”
Thank you, Donald Margulies.