MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tony Award-winning playwright Richard Greenberg died of cancer in a Manhattan nursing home on July 4. He was 67. Reporter Jeff Lunden says the prolific author was known for sparkling wit and wordplay colored with a tinge of melancholy.
JEFF LUNDEN: When playwright Tony Kushner was asked to profile Richard Greenberg for the New York Times Style Magazine, he dubbed him the bard of American privilege.
BEN BRANTLEY: He and Kushner are peers, almost, in terms of the articulateness of their characters, I think.
LUNDEN: Ben Brantley was chief drama critic for the New York Times throughout much of Richard Greenberg's career. Brantley says...
BRANTLEY: He was singular. There was both a kind of an old-fashioned structure to what he was doing and a lyricism, eloquence in the dialogue that you associate with another era of playwriting.
LUNDEN: Greenberg grew up in Long Island and was educated at Princeton and the Yale School of Drama, and he went on to write over 30 plays. Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, produced and directed many of them.
LYNNE MEADOW: My respect for Rich was there from the beginning, and it only grew over time in the next 3 1/2 decades when we got to work together so many times. Manhattan Theatre Club produced a total of 11 world, New York and Broadway premieres of Rich's plays.
LUNDEN: Among them "Eastern Standard," which became Greenberg's first Broadway hit, and "Three Days Of Rain," about a brother and sister coming to grips with their parents' complicated and unknowable relationship after their father's death. Ben Brantley.
BRANTLEY: He's always aware of how everything is ultimately a mystery. We have these great moments of illumination, these epiphanies. But ultimately, people remain mysteries, and he respects that.
LUNDEN: Greenberg's biggest hit was "Take Me Out," which won him a Tony in 2003 and again for its revival in 2022. It looked at a biracial baseball player who comes out as gay and the consequences of that disclosure. One of the roles, a financial adviser who becomes a huge baseball fan, was kind of autobiographical.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JESSE TYLER FERGUSON: (As Mason Marzac) As for the last several weeks, I've been conversing with all sorts of people I'd never been able to speak to before - cab drivers, my five brothers.
(LAUGHTER)
FERGUSON: (As Mason Marzac) Then...
LUNDEN: At his death, Richard Greenberg was working on a new piece. It'll premiere posthumously in Chicago in January.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE VIOLET HOUR")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (As character, singing) When it's not quite day, but it's not quite night. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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